“We were both human. Shorter than our real selves, and with pale skin and yellow hair.” There seemed to be something he wasn’t telling, Tariq thought.
This story is set, with Morpheus' permission, in the same setting as his story “The Travel Agency” and its three sequels. Thanks to Morpheus for his feedback on the first draft.
The original stories and this one need not be read in any particular order.
“Toys, charms, ornaments — rare woods and fine workmanship.” The voice was not the loudest or shrillest in the bazaar, but it carried well enough, and conveyed such an unostentatious confidence as to bring its possessor a steady stream of business throughout the day. The man who called out this announcement was gray of hair and beard, with a deeply lined face, and enormously strong arms ending in sturdy hands with surprisingly delicate fingers for one of his size. Observant customers noticed that no legs protruded from the hem of his not unusually long robe; but they politely made no comment, except on the quality of his workmanship and their great regret that their extreme poverty did not allow them to pay him the kingly price it deserved. The toy-carver, in turn, deprecated the work of his hands and urged it on them as a gift, poor, indeed, and not worthy of their estimable character, but the best he could offer. After five or six exchanges of this sort, a compromise would be reached, and money would change hands — five, six, ten, sometimes twenty or twenty-five dinar for an unusually large and fine piece.
As the sun lowered to the west, and shadows grew long, and some of the traders in the bazaar packed up their things to return home, a shadow fell across the toy-carver’s booth. He looked up from the long stick of mahogany which he was carving into the likeness of a dragon — a strange beast of the far north which few people in that city had ever seen, though the toy-carver himself was one.
“Ul-Kalsim!” he cried. “It has been long since I saw you. Come, embrace me. Return to my home and eat and drink with me!” He set aside the knife and the wood and held out his massive arms; the other man knelt and they hugged, then kissed one another’s cheeks.
Ul-Kalsim was a tall man, some ten years younger than the toy-carver, his hair still black with hardly a gray hair. He wore a white robe of fine silk, jeweled rings on three of his fingers, and a scimitar at his belt.
“Tariq,” he said, “accept my apologies for not coming to see you sooner or more frequently. The duties of my post keep me busy day and night, as you know better than anyone.”
“Yes, for I filled that post longer than you. Come, let us return to my home — business is slow for the last hour, I may as well close up.”
“I would, my friend, but I need you to meet someone. And is your home conveniently sized and situated to host a camel-centaur?”
“No,” Tariq replied, his eyebrows raising. “It is on the second story of a house not far from here. The stair is perhaps too narrow for a camel-centaur, and my room is certainly too small... Where to, then?”
“A house on the street of the glassblowers, perhaps half a mile to the west. How will you go?”
“Following you, of course, since you seem to know the way.” Tariq took up the four corners of the cloth on which his wares were spread out, tying it into a bundle. He opened a large box and set the bundle inside, then, closing it, lifted himself with his massive arms and sat astride the box. Only then did ul-Kalsim notice that the box had wheels on it.
“Lead the way,” said Tariq. Ul-Kalsim glanced uncertainly at him, then walked slowly to the west, followed by Tariq, pushing the upper rims of the front wheels. They kept to the walls, avoiding the donkey and camel traffic in the center of the streets, and proceeded south along the bazaar avenue a short way to a side-street, then west on the street of the silversmiths, which became the street of the glassblowers after a quarter-mile. At last they reached their destination, and entered a house with a high, wide door. Its large windows illuminated a high ceiling and several tables and cabinets, most of them too large for most humans to use conveniently, plus two low couches of human size and a lower table. On one of these couches reclined a human seemingly in early middle age, but with eyes that spoke of long experience and hard-won wisdom, wearing a green robe. Standing beside one of the higher tables was a camel-centaur, nude after the custom of his people, except for a small knapsack slung in front of his hump.
“Greetings, ul-Kalsim,” the camel-centaur said. “Is this the man you told us about?”
“Tvalenn, this is Tariq, my predecessor in office, disabled and retired six years ago. Tariq, this is Tvalenn, one of my best sources for events in the western desert. The Subtle One,” gesturing to the green-robed man who was now rising to greet them, “you know as well as I do.”
Tariq bowed to Tvalenn and the Subtle One as best as his handicap would allow. “I am honored to meet you,” he said to Tvalenn. “And you, Your Mystery, look no older than the day I retired.”
The Subtle One bowed in acknowledgment. Tvalenn bowed too, lower than one not familiar with camel-centaurs would have believed possible.
The camel-centaur, apparently their host, then called a servant and gave her orders; soon tea was served, and generous portions of sweetbread, roast lamb, and pickled olives.
“Well,” said Tariq to ul-Kalsim, “I know that this was not merely a social call. What do you need my advice about?”
“Not only your advice, my friend, but your help.”
“Help? What help can I give, in my condition, other than my advice? But say on.”
“You shall hear. Tvalenn, would you be so good as to explain to Tariq and the Subtle One what you told me this morning?”
Tvalenn nodded and began.
“About two months ago I first heard rumors of a mage from the far north who had appeared in the western desert, in the foothills of the mountains. He calls himself the Gray One, and he claims to be able, for a moderate fee, to send people to another world and bring them back some days later. I have not yet seen him myself, but a few days ago I finally managed to find and speak with someone who had supposedly traveled to this other world.”
“What is this other world like?” Tariq asked.
“I was not able to gain a clear account,” Tvalenn admitted. “My informant was a young camel-centaur, perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old, who was enthusiastic but not terribly coherent in describing his experiences. I am not entirely certain that the Gray One is not simply inducing hallucinations in his marks. One thing was clear, however; if this voyage to another world is real, it involves sending the soul and leaving the body behind. While in the other world — or while hallucinating about another world — he had, or seemed to have, the body of a human, eight or ten years older than his true age. He told me of a great city with buildings taller than mountains, of magical carts which roll far faster than a gazelle can run but are pulled by nothing visible, of small ovens which cook a meal in a few heartbeats... And these things are the possessions not only of the rich, but of nearly everyone. If the tale is true, it seems the other world is much richer in magic than our own.”
“Possibly,” said the Subtle One. “I will reserve judgment until I meet the Gray One and see how his spell works. If he can truly send a person’s soul into another world and bring it back, he is a greater mage than I; but if he is merely inducing hallucinations, then I am greater than he, and will be able to detect his deception, and protect the rest of you from it.”
“I see,” Tariq said. “If he is a charlatan, we cannot allow him to continue to prey on the sultan’s subjects unpunished. And if he is truly the great mage he claims to be, we need to know more about him, whether he is a threat to the security of the sultanate.”
“We also need to know more about this other world,” ul-Kalsim said. “If the Gray One can send people from our world there, quite possibly he can bring people from the other world hither, or there may be mages there who can send their own people here. Can they send them in large enough numbers for an invasion? What weapons do they have? What are their intentions, to make war on us or trade with us or simply ignore us?”
Tariq nodded. “Whom, then, do you plan to send? Tvalenn for a local guide, of course, and the Subtle One to investigate the Gray One’s spells or hoaxes. I suggest young Ghantim, if he is still in your service — he has traveled in the desert and foothills before, and knows the local languages.”
“I was thinking that we four would go,” ul-Kalsim said, “with perhaps one other, who will join us on the way.”
“We four? But I —” Tariq gestured toward the hem of his robe. “I would not be much help, beyond the streets of the city.”
“You forget,” said ul-Kalsim, “that if the Gray One’s magic is real, and we succeed in finding him, you and all of us will have other bodies in the other world. You will be able to walk; and there your experience and quick wits will count for more than Ghantim’s youth and strong legs.”
“Oh...” A light came into Tariq’s eyes and a broad smile slowly spread over his face.
They set out on the morning of the second day following. Tariq had returned to his rooms and paid his landlord in advance for two months, then entrusted his most valuable possessions to a friend who lived in the same quarter. He met ul-Kalsim and the others at Tvalenn’s lodgings that evening, and spent the night with them, going over their plans.
ul-Kalsim requisitioned three fine camels from the sultan’s stables, which the humans were to ride. He offered to help Tariq mount, but his old friend shrugged and said it wasn’t necessary; he barked a command at the well-trained beast, which knelt, then lifted himself onto its back with his thickly muscled arms and situated himself in the saddle before ordering the camel to rise.
They left by the western gate well before dawn, Tvalenn in the lead, and traveled until nearly noon before they stopped at the first caravanserai to rest from the heat of the day. A few hours later, after a meal and a nap, they moved on, and kept going until the moon set some hours after the sun.
That night, as they lay curled in their blankets looking up at the stars, ul-Kalsim asked Tariq, “Why did you leave?”
“For several reasons,” Tariq said, and was silent for some moments. Then: “I don’t want you, or the sultan, to think I wasn’t grateful. You saved my life, and the sultan rewarded me well for my years of service — as well as he knew how. But living in the palace, with so many servants... I was growing soft. Having servants to lift me out of bed, and put me in the bath, and set me up in a chair when I had visitors, and carry me to the council chamber when the sultan wanted my advice, I was growing weak and sickly. I resolved to do without them as much as I could; I pulled myself out of bed one morning, and dragged myself to the bath, ordering the servants to stand by and do nothing but bring the water. By the time I reached the tub, I was exhausted, and had finally to let the servants lift me into it; and I was good for nothing else that day. But day after day my arms grew stronger, and I grew bored with palace life. I could no longer travel as I used to, but I could at least go out into the city, and I did. And as I was going through the bazaar one day, I remembered how my father had taught me to carve wood, and thought that now would be a good time to take it up again.”
“You do it very well. But I think you serve your country better with your other skills.”
“Perhaps so.”
Early the next day they passed a caravan going east. Two camel-centaurs, man and wife, together with their three children, led and drove a train of twenty ordinary camels laden with bags and boxes. Tvalenn called out to them in Sikva, the language spoken by most of the camel-centaurs in the western desert, and they answered, telling him of conditions on the trail ahead. Tariq knew the language well, though he had not had occasion to speak it in recent years. An important oasis two days ahead had been partly buried by a recent sandstorm; a team had been dispatched to dig it out, but it was unlikely that they would be able to get water there when they arrived.
That night they reached what, because of the buried oasis ahead, would be the last place to get water for nearly five days. This was no hardship for Tvalenn, but the humans would get more than a little thirsty by the time they reached the next usable oasis.
They went on, stopping each day a little before noon and going on when the sun was well past its zenith. As their water ran low and their throats grew dry, they spoke less and less. They passed the buried oasis in the afternoon of the third day, and found four male camel-centaurs working with shovels to remove the sand from the pool and the bases of the date-palms. Tvalenn greeted them, but they did not stop for long.
Finally, when there seemed to be only a sip or two of water left in their last flasks, they reached the next oasis. Its date-palms were inhabited by a small family of pixies. Both Tvalenn and Tariq knew their language, though pixies were rare in the desert and unheard of near the cities. After greeting their hosts, they drank greedily and refilled their water-flasks, then began trade negotiations. Tvalenn had brought small flasks of the grape-wine and rice-wine brewed in countries to the east, and spools of fine thread, which after much banter, they traded to the pixies in exchange for some of their dates and a small flask of the finest date-wine to be found in the sultanate — only a few sips, but each one worth a whole bottle of the ordinary stuff made from the dates that grew near the city. They remained there the rest of the day and through the night, trading stories and songs with their tiny hosts. Tariq carved a likeness of the matriarch of the clan out of palm-wood, and gave it to her with his thanks.
The desert grew more and more beautiful as they continued westward. The deep drifts of sand receded and rock formations of eerie shapes and a thousand colors took their place. These gave better landmarks than the seemingly trackless sands, but to those unfamiliar with them it was as easy to get lost here as among the dunes. Tvalenn led them unhesitatingly and unerringly through both. They passed several more eastbound caravans, most of them consisting of camel-centaurs leading baggage-laden camels, but now and then one with human or dwarf passengers.
One morning, when they rose well before dawn to begin their day’s journey, the Subtle One led them on a detour into a box canyon. Tvalenn protested, but ul-Kalsim said it was necessary, and the camel-centaur fell silent. When they reached the end of the canyon, a sheer wall twenty or twenty-five feet high, the Subtle One spoke in a language Tariq didn’t recognize. There was a long silence, and then the rock... twisted, shifted. It wasn’t a rockslide, nor anything so simple as a door in the rock sliding open, but one moment the rock was solid and an eye-watering moment later, there was an oval hole in it. A creature stepped out of the hole, and the party stepped back to give it room. It stood higher than the walls of the canyon, and Tariq wondered how it could have fit through the hole. It was more like a man than a camel-centaur, but with iridescent bat-like wings whose upper tips caught the dawn light coming over the walls of the canyon.
The creature spoke in that unknown language, in a voice like crackling flames. The Subtle One said: “Greetings, ul-Balimmu. Please do us the favor of speaking in a language my companions can understand.”
“Greetings, Subtle One,” the creature said. “And you, Tariq, ul-Kalsim, Tvalenn. What brings you to my home?”
“We have a proposal,” said the Subtle One. “Have you heard of a mage called the Gray One?”
“No... it is many days since I came above ground. Perhaps many years; one loses track. Is he a child, younger than your august self?”
“He is no child; he may be older and more powerful than I — or he may not. But he is new to this land. And if he is a danger, I thought the ifrits would want to know as well as the sultan and his servants.”
“You thought correctly. Where is this Gray One, that I may see him and sift his heart?”
“I do not know, but the last we heard of him, he was somewhere to the west. In the foothills, probably, or in the mountains. We go to seek him and assess whether he is a threat. Will you come with us?”
“I will.”
“You might wish to take another form, which will not frighten those who mean us no harm.”
“Your idea has merit.” Then, with a twist and a shift which made Tariq’s eyes water again, the ifrit became — or took the appearance of — a camel-centaur, about Tvalenn’s age but with darker hair. The oval hole in the rock closed up at the same time.
They returned to the caravan-trail and Tvalenn led the way again. As they went, the others filled in the ifrit on the stories they had heard about the Gray One and his other world.
They were five more days passing through the canyons. Sometimes Tariq would wake during the night and see only one camel-centaur silhouetted against the stars; if he lay awake long enough, he might see a shape like a coyote or big cat slink into the camp, twist and shift and become a camel-centaur once more.
Finally they reached the foothills, where the soil was better though the rainfall was hardly more frequent than in the rocky or sandy desert. All the agriculture here depended on irrigation, water brought by tunnels and pumps from the river which collected itself from a dozen streams out of the mountains only to spend itself uselessly in a salt lake far out in the sands. These hills were inhabited by camel-centaurs and humans in nearly equal numbers, visited fairly often by dwarf traders from the mountains.
When they reached the large village at which the caravan-trail terminated, they made inquiries about the Gray One. Had anyone seen him? Had anyone taken his offer to travel to the other world? No, no one here had done either, though several said they had heard of him. Perhaps they might find him in one of the villages to the north, someone said. So the next morning they set out northward along the ridge. They stopped at three villages before nightfall, asking everyone they met about the Gray One. Still they met no one who had seen him, though as they continued they met more and more who had heard of him, and finally, in the village where they stopped for the night, they were referred to some adventurous youths who had gone out looking for him, and come back giving dark hints that they knew much more than they would say.
The next morning they found the boys, a camel-centaur and a human, who had supposedly met the Gray One and gone to the other world. They bribed them with date-wine (of good quality, but not the pixie-made brew) and coaxed them to talk.
“No, we didn’t see him,” said Baltvai, the camel-centaur. “But we found one of his servants, and he took our money and put the spell on us — his master had given it to him, already cast, ready to use on whoever could pay. He said it wouldn’t take effect right away, but within a day or two. And then, just a few hours later, we were in that other world...” He trailed off, looking past ul-Kalsim’s shoulder into the distance.
“There was a flash of blue light,” said Saluq, the human, “and I lost all my feeling for a moment, and then I was in another place, in another body.” He flushed and took a long swig of wine.
“What kind of body?” asked the Subtle One.
“Human,” Saluq said shortly. “We were both human. Shorter than our real selves, and with pale skin and yellow hair.” There seemed to be something he wasn’t telling, Tariq thought.
“Anyway, we were in a little room, lit by bright lamps set into the ceiling, and there were big metal cabinets all around. And there was a mage there, or anyway a man with a wooden staff like I hear tell mages use, and he introduced us to another man, who was supposed to be our guide to the other world. And then... he led us outside, and we looked up, and up, and up.”
“The buildings there were incredible,” Baltvai said. “As tall as ten houses. No, fifty, some even a hundred — I couldn’t be sure.”
“And the carts!” Saluq said. “They went so fast, with nothing pulling them. Someone would sit inside — they were nearly all of them covered with roofs, like a little house, but with glass-covered windows all around. And they’d turn a wheel and make the cart turn this way or that. Some of the carts we rode in were as big as houses, long and narrow ones with lots of benches for people to sit on.”
“Consistent with the other boy’s story,” Tvalenn murmured.
The Subtle One asked more questions about the room where they’d first found themselves, and the man they’d seen with the staff. (The Subtle One’s own school of magic didn’t go in for staves; he’d once, when he and Tariq got drunk after a mission, scoffed at mages who depended on them as lazy and unimaginative, and then, getting drunker still, confessed that there were some spells — ones far beyond his ken — for which even the most powerful mages needed a staff as focus.) But the boys hadn’t been very observant; all they could say was that he was middle-aged, bald, and pale of skin like their new bodies, and that his staff was of a dark wood they didn’t recognize.
“It wasn’t palm or lemon,” Saluq said.
“What about your own bodies?” Tariq asked. “Did you have someone watching over them while your souls were in the other world?”
“Didn’t we tell you?” Baltvai said. “The people whose bodies we used, their souls came and lived in our bodies for the two days we were in the other world. The Gray One’s servant who put the spell on us said he would guide them while they were in our world, keep them out of trouble and our bodies safe, and he kept his word — we were with him when we came back, and healthy and sated.”
Ul-Balimmu asked where it was that they had met the Gray One’s servant, and what he looked like. An hour later, after further questions which yielded nothing certain or useful, they set out in the direction the boys had indicated.
It was two more days before they found the Gray One’s servant, or rather, he found them. They met several more people who said they had been to the other world. Their stories were consistent on many points — all mentioned the tall buildings and the fast, donkeyless carts, and all of them, whether camel-centaur or dwarf or human, said they had been human while in the other world, and had seen no non-human people while there. One woman they met told them shyly that both she and her husband had been men while they were in the other world; hearing that, Tariq thought he knew what Saluq and Baltvai were keeping back.
They were sitting one evening in the common room of the inn in a small village near a dwarf warren. Dwarves sat drinking ale around the low tables at one end of the room, while camel-centaurs stood drinking date-wine around the high tables at the other, and humans in between; Tariq and the others sat and stood by one of the human-sized tables. A man in a gray tunic came in, looked around, spoke with one some of the camel-centaurs near the door, and then approached their table.
“I am Barsiq. I hear you have been asking questions about my master,” he said, sitting down in the empty chair next to Tariq.
“Do you serve the Gray One?” ul-Kalsim asked.
“I do. Are you interested in visiting the other world?”
“We are.”
“Hmm... there are five in your party, are there not?”
“Yes — myself, ul-Kalsim; Tvalenn; Tariq; ul-Balimmu; and Sumalm,” nodding toward each as he said their names. Sumalm was a name the Subtle One sometimes went by when he did not wish it to be known he was a mage.
Barsiq nodded thoughtfully. “A party of five may be difficult to match with a party of the same size from the other world,” he said. “But it can be done. It is a matter of time. Come with me, and I will prepare you.”
After they had paid for their meal and drinks, they followed him out of the village, past the irrigated terraces, and past the entrance of the dwarf-warrens, to a deserted place hidden from view by surrounding hills. The Subtle One and ul-Balimmu asked him questions about his master and the magic he would use to send them to the other world, and Tariq and ul-Kalsim asked him questions about the other world, but to the former he mostly answered, “I do not know,” and to the latter, “You will see.”
“All of you stand very still until I say you can move,” he warned them, once they had reached the spot. He walked widdershins around them, taking a bag of blue powder from his tunic pocket and sprinkling it on the ground in a circle around them. Then he watched the sky, licked his finger and held it up to judge the wind (which was not blowing strongly in that hollow), and finally said: “You may return to the inn. I will communicate with the Gray One, and tell him you are ready, and then return to wait with you. He will bring you to the other world as soon as he finds a group of five natives of that world who wish to visit ours.”
“How long might that be?”
Barsiq shrugged. “It may be hours — more likely days. Probably not more than a month. You should all stick close to one another, and to me, as much as possible while we are waiting.”
“Will that affect the spell?” the Subtle One asked.
“No, but it may cause trouble for the visitors from the other world, if one or two of them are separated from their friends and their guide when they arrive.”
So they returned to the inn, and were joined there by the Gray One’s servant a few hours later.
They passed two more days in that village, mostly in the common room of the inn. All of them heeded the man’s advice to stick close together, except for ul-Balimmu, who slipped out each night to wander none knew where, in none knew what shape. But even he stayed with them during the day, and mostly kept to the same camel-centaur form he had assumed when he joined their mission.
One afternoon, when the common room was nearly deserted and the scouts were growing bored beyond reason, Barsiq suddenly started up from his doze and said: “It is nearly time.”
“Have you heard from the Gray One?” ul-Kalsim asked.
“Yes — he has a group of five, and is preparing them now. You will have the best of the bargain, I think,” with a meaningful glance at Tariq’s missing legs, “— they are all young and healthy.” He smiled. “Perhaps when you return we can compare our experiences in the other world. I know you have been frustrated that I would not speak of it, but really, until you have exper-”
Tariq could guess that he was probably going to say something like “...experienced it, you would not believe what I say.” But just then he saw a blue flash of light, and felt momentarily dizzy. The bright blue light was replaced by a dimmer but still bright white light, and he was standing — Standing! On whole, sound legs! He didn’t see them at first, but he felt them!
He was standing in a room, smaller than the common room at the inn. It was less cluttered than the room Baltvai and Saluq had described, with only one cabinet and no other furniture. But the first thing he noticed was that he was surrounded by women — four young women, perhaps twenty years of age, and one woman about his own age or a little younger, with gray hair tied into a bun. None of them wore veils; the younger women wore tight tunics and trousers, and the older woman wore a looser gray blouse and a long black skirt.
Two of the young women were acting strangely, looking down at themselves and cupping hands to their breasts in a most immodest way. Another was looking around the room curiously, just as Tariq was. The fourth was staring at the older woman — who, Tariq now realized, was holding a wooden staff. The Gray One? The boys they had questioned had described the mage as a man, but Tariq had seen the Subtle One assume a variety of appearances for different missions; a mage could look like anything they chose.
He looked down to see his new whole, healthy legs, and got a shock. He was wearing a tight-fitting tunic not unlike those the young women were wearing. And it was tight enough to clearly outline the shapes of two breasts. They were not so large that he could not see past them to the feminine legs covered in tight trousers of a mottled blue fabric, or the flat crotch where those legs joined.
I'll probably post part two in about a week.
When Wasps Make Honey, the sequel to Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes, is now available from Amazon in Kindle format and from Smashwords in EPUB format. See here for more information.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. An earlier version of this story was serialized on the morpheuscabinet and tg_fiction mailing lists in January 2013.
“Dear body-borrower,
“I hope you have fun in my body and my world, but not too much fun, if you know what I mean.”
This story is set, with Morpheus' permission, in his Travel Agency universe.
This story is set, with Morpheus' permission, in the same setting as his story “The Travel Agency” and its three sequels. Thanks to Morpheus for his feedback on the first draft.
The original stories and this one need not be read in any particular order.
“I’m a girl!” exclaimed one of the young women who was holding her breasts.
“We all are, apparently,” said the much calmer voice of the woman who was looking around the room. “Surely you considered the possibility? There was that woman we spoke to who became a man while she was here...”
“Never mind,” Tariq said. “I’m just happy to have legs again! I haven’t been able to pee standing up for the last six years anyway...”
“You must be Tariq,” said the other woman who had been touching her breasts — though now she hastily stopped and put her hands on her hips. “I’m ul-Kalsim.”
“I’m ul-Balimmu,” said the woman who’d been looking around, turning her attention to ul-Kalsim.
“I’m Tvalenn,” said the other woman who was still cupping her breasts, twisting and looking behind her — at her missing camel-hindquarters, Tariq supposed.
“And you are the Gray One,” said the fourth woman, who had been looking straight at the older woman the whole time, and bowed to her.
“Yes,” said the gray-haired woman. “I see I must teach my servant Barsiq to recognize a mage when he sees one. But no harm done. I mean you and your sultan no harm. I will allow you a few more minutes to become accustomed to your bodies; you may come out when you are ready.” And with that, she withdrew through the only door in the room, taking her staff with her.
“I was resigned to being human,” Tvalenn fumed, “but a woman...!”
“Calm down,” ul-Kalsim said, taking a deep breath herself. “As ul-Balimmu said, we should have been prepared for the possibility that some of us might get female bodies... I feared as much, though I did not expect we would all be female, or so young. How can we pursue our investigations in such low-status forms?”
“Come, ul-Kalsim, we are clever and resourceful,” said Tariq. “We will learn much — perhaps even more than we could in men’s bodies, if we adapt to our new selves quickly and use our advantages well. — O Subtle One: is it your professional opinion that we are not hallucinating?”
“We certainly are not,” she replied. “Or if we are, it is a finely detailed hallucination created by magic far beyond my powers. We weren’t simply drugged with something Barsiq put in our drinks. Indeed...” She looked around, puzzled. “There is so little ambient magic, I don’t know how the Gray One, powerful as she is, managed to bring us here. Certainly she could have brought nothing material over, and even bringing our souls must have taken incredible skill and great effort.”
“Well,” Tariq said, “let’s go. Or do you wish to ‘become accustomed to your bodies’ for a while longer?”
“Not here,” ul-Kalsim said. “You’re right; we must do the best we can in these bodies.”
All five were young and healthy, as Barsiq had said. Tariq’s borrowed body, and the Subtle One’s, were a little darker of skin than their original bodies, with black hair; the other three had much lighter skin, almost pale, and ul-Kalsim and Tvalenn had yellow or whitish-yellow hair, while ul-Balimmu’s was a light brown. It was hard to judge of their height, with no familiar objects to compare them to, but ul-Balimmu was the shortest of them and the Subtle One the tallest, with Tariq somewhere in the middle. Most of them, including Tariq, had small handbags on long straps hanging from their shoulders.
Tariq led the way from the room, marveling at the play of the muscles in her legs and hips. The way she walked in this body was not the way he had walked before he was bitten by a ghoul and had to have his legs amputated before the rot spread to his torso, but it was deliciously wonderful.
The door led to a short hallway; Tariq heard low voices coming from her right, and went that way. She found the Gray One speaking with another young woman, about the same age as Tariq’s new body, in a large room whose walls were covered with brightly-colored pictures. Some of the pictures reminded her of some of the places he had seen in his travels as a young man; verdant forests, sandy beaches, snow-capped mountains... Others were strange, so strange that it was hard to make out what if anything they represented.
“Here they are,” said the Gray One. “Honored visitors, this is Melanie. She will be your guide during your stay in this world.”
“Hi,” said Melanie. “I’m sure we’ll have a blast.”
“I’m sure,” Tariq murmured, becoming suddenly aware that she and the others, since their arrival in these bodies, had not been speaking the chief language of the sultanate, nor Sikva, nor the dialect of the foothills, nor any language of their world. It was only when Melanie spoke, using that curious colloquialism, that Tariq became aware of it. (When she said the word “blast” Tariq saw a vague mental image of fireworks, superimposed on a group of young people drinking and feasting.)
The others followed her down the hall into the main room, and Tariq introduced them. Melanie smiled at each of them and repeated their names, pronouncing most of them more or less correctly. But then she said: “You might want to learn the names of the girls whose bodies you’re wearing. And when we’re in public, call each other by those names — your world’s names will sound strange to people who don’t know where you’re from.”
“Of course,” Tariq said, for whom assumed names lasting only the duration of a mission were nothing new. The others agreed as readily.
Tariq’s body, it turned out, belonged to a young woman named Keisha. Ul-Kalsim was to be called Stephanie; ul-Balimmu, Natalie; Tvalenn, Rae Nan; and the Subtle One, Lauren.
“And, Keisha — you don’t mind if I start calling you that now?”
“Of course — it will help me learn to answer to it.”
“Indeed,” said ul-Kalsim — Stephanie — “let’s use those names among ourselves for as long as we’re here. Let there be no slip-ups, people.”
Melanie looked surprised at Stephanie’s serious tone, but went on: “So — Keisha, the girl whose body you were wearing gave me a note for you. Here it is.” She took a slip of paper from the high desk at which she stood and handed it to Keisha.
“I’ve got one for you, too, Natalie,” Melanie said, as Keisha read her note:
“Dear body-borrower,
“I hope you have fun in my body and my world, but not too much fun, if you know what I mean. You’re welcome to sleep in my apartment and wear my clothes, and eat the food in my kitchen (within reason; don’t open any bottles of wine that aren’t already open, that stuff’s expensive here), but don’t move stuff around so I can’t find it when I get back. And don’t you dare have sex in my body. I promise not to have sex while I’m in yours, — unless your people have Pon-Farr or something while I’m there and I can’t help it. Anyway. My credit card is maxed out just now from paying Ms. G. for the vacation, so don’t try to use it, but I have some cash in my purse that should last you a week if you don’t waste it and mostly eat from the groceries I have at home. Most of my friends have gone to Fort Lauderdale for Spring Break, except the ones who are going to your world with me, and my boyfriend, who’s gone home to visit his parents this week. He might be back before I am; if so, or if you meet anybody else who knows me and thinks you’re me, pretend you’re in a hurry and say you’ll talk to them next week. If my phone rings, just let it go to voice mail. Never mind, I’ll just turn it off before I go.
“Your host,
“Keisha Grant.”
“I understood most of that, I think,” Tariq said, reflecting that she’d magically acquired a knowledge of this language’s written form as well, though that part of the spell didn’t seem to work perfectly. “But there are many things that puzzle me.”
“What parts?” Melanie asked. “Do you mind if I look...?” Tariq held it out to her and pointed in turn to a few words and phrases that baffled her.
“Let’s see — credit card, that’s a sort of tool for buying things without having to carry coins around. Like keeping a tab at an inn, sort of. Pon-Farr — um —” Melanie blushed. “It’s a long story. An allusion to a famous play... Um, don’t some of the peoples in your world have sex only at certain times of year, and then they can hardly stop themselves? Merfolk, for instance? Not like humans or elves, who can take it or leave it any time.”
“I’ve heard of merfolk, but never met any — I wouldn’t know. I’m human myself, as are, um, Stephanie and Lauren. Rae Nan is a — um —” She hesitated, not finding a ready word in this language she was speaking, and coined an ad-hoc compound: “a camel-centaur. And Natalie is an ifrit.” That word wasn’t quite right either, but it was a closer fit than simply calling Tvalenn a “centaur”, which here seemed to refer exclusively to the horse-men of the north.
“Cool...! Anyway, if you’re a human your body should be fine when you get back; she’s not going to get you knocked up or diseased while you’re gone... What else? Oh, her phone. It’s a little machine for talking to people a long way away. You don’t know anybody here but me, and I’ll be with you for most of the day every day, so you probably won’t need it, but I’ll show you how to make an emergency call... Spring Break? That’s a time when college students have a week of vacation — right now, in fact.”
Tariq put the pieces together. “Then these bodies we wear, these women whose souls are now in our bodies — they are scholars?”
Melanie laughed nervously. “I don’t know about scholars, but they’re all students, yeah. And Stephanie there, I mean the real Stephanie, she’s a lot better student than I ever was — I don’t know about the rest, they’re Stephanie’s friends, not mine.”
Tariq wondered why Keisha’s other friends would be traveling to a fortress during this vacation from their studies; perhaps to carry on affairs of gallantry with the soldiers? But many other questions drove that one out of her mind, and she never did find out. ul-Balimmu — Natalie — had been puzzling over her note from her body’s original inhabitant, and conferring with the Gray One and the other scouts over the unfamiliar words. They looked up now and Stephanie said to Tariq:
“Keisha, what does yours say?”
She showed her commander the note. Stephanie wrinkled her nose and said, “I have no intention of sleeping with a man; they have no reason to fear that we will defile their bodies... What’s this about the ‘credit card’?”
Tariq explained. “What about the note from, ah, Natalie? What did it say?”
Stephanie said, “Natalie says we shouldn’t stay in the ‘dorms;’ apparently that is a lodging house for young scholars — female scholars, can you imagine? She recommends that we all stay over at Keisha and Lauren’s apartment ‘off-campus,’ a mile from the university, during our stay. She thinks too many people will recognize us if we stay at the student lodgings.”
“That could be awkward,” Tariq said. “We might blow our cover if we meet someone who knows the real Keisha or Stephanie.”
“You’ve all got driver’s licenses, and Stephanie at least owns a car,” Melanie said — again puzzling the visitors with the imperfect way the language-acquisition spell seemed to have worked — “but none of you know how to drive, Ms. G.'s acclimation spell isn’t that thorough. We’ll just leave Stephanie’s car in the parking lot the whole time, and I’ll drive you around, or we’ll take the bus and subway.”
“I understood very little of that,” Tariq said, after exchanging puzzled glances with the other scouts, “except that you will arrange for our transportation during our stay...?”
“Yes, exactly. Let’s go — we’ve got time to see several neat things before I drop you off at Keisha’s apartment for the night.”
“Good day,” the Gray One said. “I will see you back here in six days. Melanie, call me at once if anything goes wrong.”
“Sure thing, Ms. G.” The young woman turned toward the outer door, beckoning to her charges.
“Wait,” Stephanie said, panicking. “We can’t go out like this, can we? I mean — we’re hardly dressed. Where are our veils?”
“Women don’t wear veils here,” Melanie said, turning back. “You’re fine the way you are — that’s how the girls your bodies belong to were dressed when they got here, how lots of women dress in this weather.”
“It does seem strange,” Tariq said, when she saw that Stephanie was still hesitating, “but even in our world, the women of the north do not wear veils. We must trust our guide to tell us how women such as we appear to be dress here.” She followed Melanie out the door, and the others followed her.
They stepped outside the office and looked around. Tvalenn — Rae Nan — said, “Where are the tall buildings we were told about?”
The building they had just come out of appeared to be a single story, with one section that rose to perhaps two stories. It had many large glass windows, but other than that was not greatly different from some of the buildings Tariq had seen in foreign countries in his travels. The forecourt of the building was paved with some black substance marked with white lines; oddly shaped carts, painted in bright colors and with glass windows, were scattered around it, but Tariq didn’t at the moment see any of them rolling along faster than a gazelle under their own power. In the distance she could see other buildings, in unfamiliar architectural styles, but none higher than two or three stories.
“I suppose you’ve talked to some other travelers?” Melanie asked. “— This way, please. Yes, we have some really tall buildings here, but not in this neighborhood. We just moved to this office in the suburbs from a place downtown, where the tallest buildings in the city are. — Here,” she said, having led them to one of the larger carts in the forecourt, a silvery-gray thing with a smoothly rounded front end. “I get to drive the company minivan all week.” She took keys from a pocket and unlocked two doors in the side of the cart, gesturing for the scouts to climb in.
“Wait,” she said, “I just remembered — we need to get Stephanie, Natalie and Rae Nan’s suitcases out of Stephanie’s car, so you’ll have something to wear when you’re staying over at Lauren and Keisha’s apartment. Stephanie, can you get your keys out of your purse?”
Stephanie dug around among the things in her purse and finally came up with a ring of finely-tooled keys. It took some time to figure out which of the cars was Stephanie’s, and which of the keys on the ring would open it, but finally they got three large semi-rigid bags and put them in the back of the “company minivan.”
There were two benches in the back of the “minivan,” which word Tariq recognized as a specialized term for cars of this particular shape; she vaguely felt that she knew many other words for differently shaped and purposed cars, but couldn’t remember them at the moment. Tariq wound up sitting in a chair in the front of the minivan, next to Melanie, while the others situated themselves on the back benches.
“Fasten your seatbelts,” Melanie said. “Like this,” and she demonstrated. Tariq could see her clearly, and followed suit, but most of those in the back couldn’t see and took longer to figure out what to do. When they were all secured, Melanie turned a key in a lock on the side of a wheel, and there was a sudden loud noise, at which nearly all of them shrieked — then looked at one another in embarrassment as Melanie laughed.
“That’s just the engine starting up,” she said. “Nothing to be afraid of. Come on, I’ll take you downtown to see the skyscrapers.”
The minivan started moving, slowly at first, and then, as Melanie steered it out of the “parking lot” (Tariq suddenly remembered the word), into the street, faster and faster. Tariq gasped; she was getting conflicting information from her different senses, her sight telling her that the landscape and the other carts in the street were moving past at an incredible speed, while she felt no wind in her face such as she would feel on the back of a galloping camel... Of course, that was what the glass windows were for. Without them the wind would be so great at this speed that they could hardly breathe.
“How does it go?” the Subtle One asked no one in particular. “There’s not enough magic around to move something this massive! And I don’t sense any spells on the wheels or body of the carriage...”
“It’s not magic at all, Lauren,” Melanie said. “We don’t have any magic here, except the Gray One’s spells. And they only work in certain places, and sometimes those places move around — that’s why we had to move recently, the patch of magic around our downtown office shifted and we had to follow it.”
“Then how does this minivan move, without any animal pulling it?” Tvalenn asked.
“I don’t really know,” Melanie said. “I told you, I wasn’t a good student, especially not at science. I vaguely remember the term ‘internal combustion’ from my high school science classes, but I can’t tell you what it means.”
“Can you take us to someone who knows?” Tariq asked.
“Maybe... Natalie said you should stay away from the university in case somebody recognizes your faces. But — oh, I know. We’ll go to the Science and Technology Museum tomorrow. Does that sound interesting?”
Strange echoes resounded in Tariq’s mind when she heard the words “science” and “technology.” She wasn’t sure what they meant, but she knew they were important. “Yes,” she said at once, a moment before ul-Kalsim said the same.
Tariq had thought the minivan was moving at an incredible speed before, but soon Melanie turned them off the wide street they had first entered into a much vaster road, wide enough for four of the self-moving carts to go abreast, and increased their speed even more. Tariq gripped her seat tightly and said nothing, though she watched the large signs raised on stout poles above the sides of the road, and the increasingly tall buildings visible in the distance, and stored up questions to ask later when she wasn’t so nervous. From the silence, it seemed that the others were similarly affected.
The tall buildings grew closer and more numerous, until they were surrounded by them. After a short time Melanie turned them out of the wide road into a narrower street, and said: “Ah, the joys of finding a parking place downtown... Say, I thought you guys would have more questions. You’ve been awfully quiet.”
Natalie said: “We — at least I was savoring the experience of flying and sitting still at the same time. It was exhilarating.”
“Exhilarating?” Lauren said in a strangled tone. “I felt like I would be sick, going so fast...” They had already slowed down a great deal, and were frequently stopping and starting, as this street was much busier than the wide road they had been on.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Some people are affected that way; I tend to forget. The last couple of visitors I was guide for enjoyed the speed, like Natalie. I’ll try to stay off the expressway for the rest of your visit... Ah, here’s a good place.” She turned the minivan off of the street into a high, wide open door leading into a dark building, full of cars, minivans and similar vehicles; after circling around for a while, she found an empty space between two of the others and stopped the minivan.
“Here we are,” she said, unfastening her seat belt and opening her door. “I figure we’ll walk around downtown for a while, eat supper, maybe go dancing, before I take you to Keisha and Lauren’s apartment.”
“The dancing will not be necessary,” Stephanie said. “We are here to explore and learn.”
“All right, what else do you want to do...?” Melanie opened the other doors and let her passengers out; Lauren and Rae Nan looked ill, and Tariq was glad to be on her feet again — just having feet was such a wonderful novelty, even if they were a woman’s feet.
“First, find a privy,” Lauren said.
“Oh!” Natalie said, her eyebrows raising. “I think I need that too.”
“All right, there’s a public restroom in the Macy’s, just up the block. Come on.”
They followed Melanie through the dimly-lit building to a metal door, where Melanie pressed a knob, one of several, which lit up. “This is an elevator,” Melanie explained, and Tariq felt a vague idea stir at the sound of the word, but still wasn’t sure what it meant. Moments later the door slid aside and revealed a tiny windowless room.
“Is that the privy?” Lauren asked uncertainly.
“No, silly, come on — it’s easier to show than explain.”
They nervously crowded into the “elevator”, and watched as Melanie pressed another knob — it was labeled with a symbol for the number one, Tariq noticed. The door slid closed, and a moment later they all felt light-headed. Rae Nan started hyperventilating.
“Calm down,” Stephanie said, putting her hand over Rae Nan’s, though she was breathing none too steadily herself.
“I’m sorry,” Melanie said. “Maybe we should have taken the stairs... But see, it’s almost over.” A moment later the light-headed feeling went away and they felt momentarily heavier than normal, then the door slid open. They hurried out and followed Melanie to the high, wide doorway into the street.
There were many people walking this way and that along the sidewalk, and many minivans and other carts rolling along in the street. The traffic was heavy, but seemed orderly to Tariq, with all the cars going in a given direction staying to the same side of the street, and taking turns at intersections to let others pass. The people — every one of them human — were of a wide range of skin and hair colors, most of them lighter-skinned than her but some as dark or darker. Many of the young women were dressed like the scouts, in tight trousers and short-sleeved tunics, but some wore skirts or dresses, many with the hem above the knees, to Tariq’s astonishment and indignation. Some had low-cut tunics or blouses that revealed nearly half of their breasts. Only a handful of them were dressed more modestly than the scouts had found their borrowed bodies dressed, with longer sleeves, looser trousers or higher collars; none wore veils.
“In here,” Melanie said, and led them through a double glass door into a vast open space filled with what turned out to be racks of ready-made clothing in all the styles they had seen on the people in the streets and then some. As they followed Melanie to the privy — which turned out to be a particular kind of privy called a “restroom” — Tariq looked around, and was puzzled to see no tailors or seamstresses working, in spite of the vast amounts of clothing. Nor did she see any bolts of cloth for making the clothes. Melanie led them through an opaque swinging door with the word “Women” emblazoned on it (after so many glass or half-glass doors, and the sliding door of the elevator, Tariq no longer took it for granted that a door would look or function normally), and said:
“I’m not sure if you’ve got indoor plumbing in your part of the world...? They didn’t in the places I’ve visited, but Ms. G. tells me it’s a big place, and some parts of it are more advanced than others...”
“I don’t know the phrase ‘indoor plumbing’,” Lauren said, “so we probably don’t have it. I’ve noticed that the Gray One’s language spell doesn’t give us knowledge of words corresponding to things we don’t have in our world.”
“Yeah, that’s a kink she’s still working out of it. She’s already improved it a lot, though. Our visitors used to have trouble with idioms and figures of speech, but you can handle them fine; it’s just words that don’t match up to concepts you already have that don’t make sense. So, let me show you...” Melanie opened another swinging door, one of several in the room, to reveal a fine chamber-pot, as comfortable as the best in the sultan’s palace, except that it had no backrest. “Sit here and do your business, and when you’re done, press this lever here —” She demonstrated, and there was a whooshing sound. “That flushes it away. Oh, and use the paper on this roll to wipe with. Sorry if I’m explaining anything obvious — I’ve been to several places in your world, but not to your country yet.”
“That is clear enough,” Lauren said. “Excuse me.” She took Melanie’s place in the little sub-chamber and closed the door behind her. Natalie, who had been exploring the room, had already closed herself into another sub-chamber, and moments later Stephanie and Rae Nan decided they ought to do the same. There were only four of the screened-off chamber-pots, so that left Melanie and Tariq alone in the outer room.
“We’d probably better go while we’re here, once some of them are done,” Melanie said. “Some of the smaller places we’ll go tonight won’t have public restrooms.”
“I suppose so,” Tariq said. She was nervously looking forward to having a moment’s privacy and seeing her new legs without the trousers.
“So... do you have any more questions for me about what you’ve seen so far?”
She asked about the clothing-market they had come through on their way to the privy, and learned that it only sold ready-made clothes; the clothes were made in another place far away, a “factory,” and brought here in “trucks,” self-moving wagons like the minivans but far larger. At the word “truck” Tariq suddenly remembered seeing some of them on the “expressway,” though she had not then recognized them or recalled their name.
“Hmm,” Melanie said. “They sure are taking a long time in there...” At that, they heard a low moan and a gasp from one of the stalls — Tariq thought it was Rae Nan’s.
“Ah, I see. Some of them were guys back in your world, weren’t they...?” Melanie smiled knowingly.
“We were all male,” Tariq said. “I thought the Gray One had told you?”
“Oh,” Melanie said, and laughed. “Well, take your time, when they finally give you a turn. I remember the first time I wound up in a guy’s body in your world, I couldn’t wait to get away from my guide for a few minutes and look at my new equipment. I like being a girl better overall, but getting to be a guy sometimes when I visit your world is —”
Just then another woman came into the restroom, about thirty, leading a little girl by the hand. She looked at the closed stall doors and said to her daughter, “Be patient, honey.”
“But I gotta go now,” the little girl whined.
Melanie, who had abruptly stopped talking when the other woman arrived, called out: “Hurry up in there, slowpokes. We’ve got a potty emergency out here.”
The whooshing sound Tariq remembered from earlier followed moments later from a couple of the stalls, and a few moments after that Stephanie opened the door of her stall and stepped out, followed by Lauren a little later.
“You can go first,” Tariq said to the woman with the little girl. The woman thanked her, and led her daughter into the stall Stephanie had vacated.
“So...” Melanie said to Stephanie as Tariq entered the stall Lauren had vacated, “what do you do when you’re at home?”
Tariq heard Stephanie giving Melanie a vague but not entirely untruthful account of ul-Kalsim’s official duties, as she figured out how to latch the door of the stall, then took a deep breath and started fumbling with the fastenings of her trousers. They turned out to have two different fastenings, one easy to undo and the other a little trickier. Finally she pulled down her trousers, then her undergarment — a lacy little thing much smaller than anything he had ever removed from a woman he had loved when he was young and handsome — and sat astride the chamber-pot. It was full of clean-looking water, which surprised her — she hadn’t had a good vantage point when Melanie had been demonstrating the use of it. Was she supposed to pee into that, and defile good water...? But she remembered her youthful travels in the east and the north, and how he had once seen an inlet of the vast ocean; water wasn’t scarce everywhere, and it must be abundant here as it was in some places in her world. She finally relaxed and let out a wide splattery stream of piss.
She tore some paper off of the roll Melanie had shown them — it was much softer than the dried leaves they used at home — and gently dried the pee off her female parts and pubic hair. Then — wondering guiltily for a moment whether someone else might be waiting her turn, like the woman with the little girl — she explored down there with her fingers. She gasped, and decided that anything further could wait for another time. She didn’t want to embarrass herself with loud moans, like Rae Nan; and she’d have six days in this body. Plenty of time to learn more about it later.
When she emerged, Melanie instructed her how to use the washbasins and their faucets which automatically pumped a continuous stream of hot or cold water. Lauren shook her head. “That’s not magic either,” she said. “There’s even less magic available here than there was at the Gray One’s office. I don’t know how they do it.”
“I’m not sure either, but we’ll try to find out tomorrow,” Melanie said. “Everyone done washing up...? Okay, let’s go.”
I'll probably post part three in about a week.
When Wasps Make Honey, the sequel to Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes, is now available from Amazon in Kindle format and from Smashwords in EPUB format. See here for more information.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. An earlier version of this story was serialized on the morpheuscabinet and tg_fiction mailing lists in January 2013.
“Being a woman is nothing,” Natalie said. “I’ve been men and women, male and female dwarves and camel-centaurs and even merfolk. But having to stay in the same shape for six days! I don’t know if I can do it.”
This story is set, with Morpheus' permission, in his Travel Agency universe.
This story is set, with Morpheus' permission, in the same setting as his story “The Travel Agency” and its three sequels. Thanks to Morpheus for his feedback on the first draft.
The original stories and this one need not be read in any particular order.
A commenter remarked that it was hard to keep the scouts' names straight. I'll try to fix that in a future edition. For now, here's a list:
Sometime not long after that, the perpetual novelty — one new and unfamiliar thing after another ever since she arrived in this female body and this strange world — finally became too much for Tariq. She was never afterward able to clearly remember the events of that evening between leaving the clothing-market and collapsing in exhaustion in her host’s bed, later that night. Vague images of inns, bazaars, and markets, sampling strange merchandise and tasting strange food and drink, loud eerie music, crowds of strangers in exotic dress, all tangled up in her mind and came back to her in bits and pieces over the next days and months.
Tariq woke the next morning to find a strange woman in his bed. It had been so long since he had been young and healthy enough to attract a woman to sleep with him that the pale hue of her skin and her yellow hair, or the strange surroundings, at first seemed no stranger than the idea that such a beautiful woman would share his bed... certainly he had been drunk last night, on something stronger than ordinary date-wine.
Then sensations from his changed body, and memories from yesterday, snapped into focus. She was Keisha, or wearing Keisha’s body, and this woman lying next to her was Stephanie — ul-Kalsim, his old protege, later his successor in office, his commanding officer for this mission. Had they...? Apparently not; she was fully dressed, wearing the same tunic and trousers she’d worn yesterday, although she or someone had taken off her shoes and loosened the waist-fastenings of her trousers. Stephanie was dressed as modestly as she had been yesterday, though that wasn’t saying much, but had apparently changed clothes before she fell asleep.
A pressure from her bladder induced Keisha to get up, trying not to wake Stephanie, and search the room for a chamber-pot. Not finding one right away, she remembered the curious water-filled chamber-pot in the clothing market, and wondered if it might be in a separate room. That turned out to be the case.
A little later she emerged from the bathroom after peeing, washing her hands, and experimenting with the knobs on the large bathtub. She met Natalie waiting outside the door and greeted her: “Good morning.” Natalie, looking bleary, went into the bathroom, not bothering to close the door behind her as she dropped her trousers and sat down. Keisha explored the place, finding Lauren and Rae Nan more or less asleep in another bed; Lauren blinked and looked up at her as she looked into the room, but didn’t say anything.
She remembered from the note yesterday that the original Keisha had said she was welcome to any of the food and drink in the apartment, except for the wine. She explored the kitchen and found a number of things to eat and drink, some of which did not require cooking — she had a vague memory of someone trying to explain the use of the automatic-but-not-magical cooking tools, but didn’t trust herself to experiment with them just now. While she was scrounging bread, cheese, raisins, and milk (kept cold in a marvelous cabinet), Natalie came into the kitchen, followed soon by Lauren, and eventually by Rae Nan and Stephanie.
They were mostly silent, preoccupied with their own thoughts, except for desultory “Good mornings.” Finally Stephanie said: “We need to compare notes about yesterday, and make plans for the next few days. Melanie said she would come here this morning to take us to the Science and Technology Museum — does anything know what that is?”
“It is a repository of lore,” Lauren said. “She seemed to think that we could learn there how the cars work, how the toilets and sinks make water flow without our having to work the pumps, and so on.”
“You’re absolutely sure it’s not magic?” Keisha asked.
“As certain as I can be. There was little magic in the place we first arrived, less in the downtown area where Melanie took us to eat and drink, and if there is any at all here, I cannot sense it. And as low as the ambient level of magic is, it isn’t being used at all, by anyone but the Gray One, and that only in the building where we first arrived.”
“Can you do anything with it?” Stephanie asked.
“Perhaps I could levitate something tiny, an ounce or two, if we return to that area near the Gray One’s office. I couldn’t do even that with the paltry level available downtown, and nothing here.”
“I can’t stand it!” Natalie burst out, rubbing her arms together. The others looked at her in surprise; tears were running down her cheeks. “I got more and more uncomfortable all yesterday evening, and then I felt okay when I slept, but now it’s worse than ever. I’m stuck in this form and I can’t change!”
“We’re all stuck in these bodies until six days have elapsed,” Stephanie said. “Is it really so bad...?”
“She is used to changing her form at least once or twice per day,” Lauren said sympathetically, and put a hand on her shoulder. “Shh, calm down. You’ll get accustomed to it within another day or two, I hope. I felt terribly uncomfortable being a woman at first, but this morning it doesn’t feel so strange.”
“Being a woman is nothing,” Natalie said. “I’ve been men and women, male and female dwarves and camel-centaurs and even merfolk. But having to stay in the same shape for six days! I don’t know if I can do it.”
“You must, therefore you can,” Lauren said. “We will be here to help you.”
Keisha put an arm around Natalie’s other shoulder and held her while she sobbed. Finally her tears gave out and she said, “Thank you. I’ll try to be calm.”
“Is there anything we need to do to get ready before Melanie arrives?” Keisha asked.
“We should change clothes,” Stephanie said. “Melanie said that people here wear different clothes every day, and different ones for sleeping. But you were too drunk to change clothes, so we just put you to bed in what you had on.”
“And we need to bathe, too,” Rae Nan said. “Melanie said people here bathe every day.”
“She said something about a ‘shower’, didn’t she?” Natalie said. “When she said that word I had a vague image of water falling from the sky, like rain, but indoors...”
“Oh!” Keisha said. “I was experimenting with the knobs on the bathtub, before you woke up, and I found that you can get water to fall on you from above. That must be the ‘shower’.”
Since Keisha had started eating first, and was already sated, the others let her have the bathroom first while they ate some more. She found clean clothes in the drawers and closets of her host’s bedroom and took them with her into the bathroom before taking off her clothes.
There was a full-length mirror on the back of the door, and she took a few moments to study and admire her reflection. Keisha was a good-looking woman, not among the most beautiful Tariq had ever seen, but more to his taste than most of the women he had seen here, such as Stephanie or Rae Nan with their pale skin and yellow hair. She gingerly felt of her breasts for a few moments, then ran her hands down her sides and rested them on her thighs... Suddenly she remembered the note from the original Keisha: “And don’t you dare have sex in my body.” Too much self-exploration would violate the spirit of that, if not the letter. She resolved to be circumspect.
Further inspection revealed that Keisha was a virgin. After that, she turned her attention to the knobs on the bathtub. Some little experimentation got a fine mist of deliciously hot water spraying from the upper faucet; she stood under it, luxuriating in the feel of it, for a long while, then took up the bar of soap and washcloth she’d found on the shelves of the tub and began scrubbing herself. There were several bottles, tricky at first to open, which seemed to contain scented liquid soaps of several different kinds; she tried a little of each before she finally rinsed off and fiddled with the knobs until the flow of water ceased. Before she managed to turn the water off, she momentarily made the flow go suddenly cold, and gave a yelp; another few moments of frantic turning of knobs and the water ceased. She shivered, and reached for a towel.
When she had dressed and came out of the bathroom, she found the others sitting on the chairs and couches of the front room, talking.
“— yes, how those things work is important,” Stephanie was saying. “But this place is so strange and different, we hardly know what questions to ask yet. I think after we look at this ‘Science and Technology Museum’, we should — Oh, Keisha, you’re done. Good. Who has the next bath?”
“I’ll go,” said Natalie.
“Here, let me show you what I figured out about the knobs and faucets...” Keisha led Natalie into the bathroom and demonstrated what she had figured out. Natalie looked on and nodded from time to time while she stripped off her clothes. Ifrits didn’t have much if any sense of modesty... Of course, Keisha was a woman too, and it was no great breach of propriety for her to see Natalie naked.
She closed the door behind her and returned to the front room. Lauren was saying:
“...that they don’t know anything about us — just the Gray One’s servants and his clients, the people he has sent as visitors to our world, and a few friends whom they’ve told about their travels. How many people is that? If the Gray One has been operating in the north for years before he appeared in our western foothills, he must have sent hundreds of people from one world to the other, but still knowledge of our world is not general here.”
“It’s probably related to the way they have so little magic and don’t use even that,” Rae Nan said. “We’ve always known there were other worlds, though only the greatest mages can travel to them or send people to them, but if they have little or no magic, perhaps they have no suspicion that other worlds exist?”
“That’s probably it,” Stephanie suggested. “Maybe we can ask Melanie. But be circumspect; we don’t want to reveal too much to her or the Gray One.”
Just then there was a knocking at the door. The scouts looked at one another.
“That’s probably Melanie,” Stephanie said, “but in case it’s not, either Lauren or Keisha should answer that, as they are the place’s proper residents.”
“I’ll do it,” Keisha said, and went to open the door.
It was Melanie.
“Good morning,” she said. “Are you guys ready —? No? Come on, it’s already eleven o’clock! I know you were kind of drunk last night, but...”
“I have showered,” Keisha said, standing aside to let Melanie in, “and Natalie is showering now. It is your custom to shower or bathe every day, is it not?”
“Yeah, you should all do that. Well, I’m getting paid the same to show you around or wait for you, so it doesn’t matter to me.” She sat down on the sofa next to Rae Nan. There was an awkward silence for a few moments.
“So, are you excited about today?” Melanie asked.
“Yes,” Keisha said with a smile. “Can you tell us some more about the ‘Science and Technology Museum’ before we go there?”
“Well, let’s see — where should I start? I suggested it because I remember, from when I went there on field trips in high school, seeing an exhibit that shows you how a car’s engine works. You wanted to know how they work, right? And they’ve got a lot of other exhibits like that, showing how different kinds of machine work. It’s not the best museum in the world for dinosaur skeletons or stuff like that, though we’ve got a few small ones, but the technology exhibits are pretty cool.”
“That sounds like what we want,” Lauren said. “Can you explain a couple of words, though?”
“Sure.”
“What are dinosaurs?”
“They’re kind of like your world’s dragons, except they don’t breathe fire, and they aren’t around any more — they all died out millions of years ago. And most of them didn’t fly, except for the pterodactyls.”
Lauren and Keisha were the only ones on the team who had ever seen a dragon, but the others were familiar with them from travelers' tales.
“Your world has a very long history,” Lauren said, “if you can remember things that happened millions of years ago. Our oldest histories tell us only of things that happened thirteen thousand years ago.”
“Oh, that’s not history, that’s — um — archeology? Or paleontology or some other ology — I told you I wasn’t a great student. Humans weren’t around yet when the dinosaurs lived, I know that much. We dug up their skeletons and somehow, maybe we’ll find out at the museum today, scientists figured out how long ago they lived. Our actual written history goes back — um, I’m not sure, at least three thousand years and probably longer, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near thirteen thousand years. Maybe we can go to the History Museum later in the week?”
Lauren and Stephanie looked at one another. “Let’s decide later,” Stephanie said.
Just then Natalie came out of the bathroom, naked, drying her hair with a towel. “Where’s that bag of clothes we brought for my host body?” she asked. “Oh, good morning, Melanie.”
Melanie was blushing bright red, something possible only for people with pale skin like many of the people here, or in the northern regions of Keisha’s world. She looked away from Natalie, as did Stephanie.
“The bags are there in the corner, remember?” Rae Nan said. Of course, as a camel-centaur, she wasn’t bothered by nudity any more than an ifrit.
“Oh, right.” Natalie squatted and looked at them, then opened a large pink bag and started pulling clothes out of it.
“When you talked about the dinosaurs, you said something about ‘our world’s dragons’ — does that mean you don’t have any dragons here?” Keisha asked, as much to distract Melanie from her embarrassment as out of curiosity.
“Right. No, we don’t have any dragons here, or a lot of other kinds of animal and plant and people that you have in your world. I think we have some animals that you don’t have, too, but it’s hard to be sure since I’ve only seen a few places in your world, the areas where Ms. G. has been operating the longest. I didn’t know your world had camels or cactus until a couple of weeks ago, when I was guide for some people from your country for the first time.”
“But there aren’t any speaking people here except for humans?”
“Right.”
“Just in this city, or in your whole world?” Rae Nan asked.
“On this whole planet, anyway — we aren’t sure about other planets.”
“What is a planet?” Lauren asked.
“Um... I’ll show you an exhibit at the museum that will explain it better than I can do in words.”
By then Natalie was dressed, but the others had gotten so busy asking questions and listening to Melanie’s answers that no one else had gotten in the shower. Finally Stephanie said she would take the next shower. Unlike Natalie, she gathered up a change of clean clothes from her host’s bag before she went into the bathroom, and later reminded Rae Nan and Lauren to do the same.
A while later, after everyone had showered and dressed to Melanie’s satisfaction, they all went out to the minivan and got in. The Science and Technology Museum was in a part of the city with fewer tall buildings than the downtown area, but more than the neighborhood around the Gray One’s office. The Museum itself was five stories high, and strangely curved, not rectangular like most of the other buildings here — or at home, for that matter.
They each paid a few green pieces of paper — Keisha vaguely remembered Melanie explaining about paper money last night — as they entered the museum. In the front hall there were two skeletons of strange creatures, not entirely unlike dragons, but without wings — the dinosaurs Melanie had told them about. Lauren wanted to stop and study them, and read all the placards describing them, but Stephanie insisted that they first study the part of the museum dedicated to showing how machines work.
“This way, then,” Melanie said, and led them down a hall to their left, lined with glass display cases containing a bewildering variety of things. This led to a larger room which contained several cars and parts of cars, on raised stands, or hung from the ceiling with strong cords, or mounted on the walls. Some of the cars were sliced down the middle, opened up to reveal their insides, not only the passenger compartment, but the hidden workings.
“Here you go,” Melanie said. “This will show you how a car engine works.” She led them to a large placard with a stylized diagram, vaguely resembling the real car engine they saw raised on a stand beside it, and a great many words describing the diagram. She pressed a red knob and a voice began speaking.
“An internal combustion engine works by burning an energy-dense fuel, such as gasoline, inside a combustion chamber...”
They spent several hours studying the internal combustion exhibit, listening to the invisible speaker repeat his account several times and watching lights glow in different parts of the diagram, comparing the diagram to the actual engines, one whole and one cut open to reveal its insides, that were displayed alongside the whole cars. Natalie grew bored with this and wandered off to explore other parts of the museum. Melanie seemed anxious not to let her out of her sight, and, exacting a promise from the others to stay in that room, followed her. Rae Nan grew bored as well, but stayed with the others.
After a while Melanie and Natalie returned. “Are you guys hungry?” Melanie asked.
“Yes,” Keisha said, and Rae Nan, who had sat down on a bench at the other end of the room some while ago, jumped up and said: “Yes, let’s eat.” Stephanie and Lauren reluctantly allowed that they could stand to eat something, as well.
“We could eat in the museum cafeteria,” Melanie said, “but I’d rather go out to one of the restaurants down the street. They’ll stamp our hands so we can get back in.”
They followed Melanie out the front door of the museum, pausing to let an attendant make an inky mark on the back of each of their hands, and along the sidewalk to a crosswalk. Keisha vaguely remembered Melanie showing them how the walk signals worked, sometime last night. They waited until the cars rushing past suddenly slowed and stopped, then followed Melanie across the street to a restaurant. This one didn’t serve wine or the stronger stuff Keisha had drunk last night, but it served exotic food, a spicy mix of meat and vegetables wrapped in flexible pieces of flatbread.
“I think I nearly understand how these cars‘ engines make them go without magic,” Lauren said. “That is, I understand how the fuel flows through the little pipes into the chambers where it burns, and the wind from the flames makes the gears spin and the wheels turn... It’s wonderfully clever. But there is much I don’t understand, such as how the engines are built — it must take a smith months or years of work to forge all those parts, and yet you have thousands of cars on the roads, driven by poor folk as well as rich... And what is this fuel that burns in the engine, this ’gasoline'?”
“Blacksmiths don’t make car engines,” Melanie said. “They’re made in factories. Each person makes one part, and other people put the parts together, and they all work at once, so they can make lots of engines and cars in a short time. And gasoline — maybe another part of the museum explains how it’s made. I know it’s made from oil, but I don’t understand the chemistry of it.”
Stephanie said, “I understand the basic principles, but there are so many details to remember... we’ll have to spend several days comparing our memories and writing down as much as we can, when we get home.”
“So you want to make your own cars?” Melanie asked. “Cool!”
Keisha and Stephanie glanced at each other. She’d figured out what they were up to — it wasn’t hard — but she seemed okay with it.
“Yes,” Stephanie said. “If it’s possible.”
“But why don’t you start with something simpler? Like trains?”
“Trains?”
“They’re like cars, but they go on rails, instead of open roads. And they use steam engines instead of internal combustion engines, or at least they used to when they were first invented; I think they’re simpler, with not as many tiny parts. And I think they just burned coal, or even wood — so you wouldn’t have to build refineries to turn oil into gasoline.”
“That sounds promising,” Keisha said. “Is there another room at the museum that shows how a steam engine works?”
“Sure.”
Keisha, Stephanie and Lauren spent the afternoon studying the model steam engine and the diagrams explaining its workings, while Melanie escorted Natalie and Rae Nan around other parts of the museum. After the museum closed for the day, Melanie asked if they wanted to go out to eat, or go see a movie — whatever that was — or just return to the apartment.
“When we go to the apartment, can you show us how to use the oven?” Keisha asked. “I looked at it but couldn’t figure out the knobs, and couldn’t find any firewood... Does it burn gasoline like the cars?”
“Not gasoline, no. I’m not sure if the one in your apartment uses electricity or gas — natural gas, I mean, not gasoline. And I’ll show you how to use the microwave as well, that’s easier and faster. Why don’t we do it now, and eat supper at your apartment? We can go out somewhere afterward, if you’re not too tired.”
Everyone agreed — most of them were strangely tired from their day at the museum, even though they hadn’t done much but walk around a little and stand in place a lot. On reaching the apartment, they gratefully took off their shoes and sprawled on the sofa and soft chairs in the front room for a while. Keisha followed Melanie into the kitchen, where they looked in the cold-cabinet — called a “refrigerator”; as Keisha expected by now, Melanie didn’t know how that worked either, except that it used “electricity,” the same thing that powered the lamps set into the ceilings of every building they’d seen. Melanie found and identified several foodstuffs, most of them unfamiliar to Keisha, though a few she had seen and tasted in her travels, that would be easy to cook using the “microwave” — a truly marvelous oven, which cooked in a small fraction of the time a wood-burning oven or stove would require.
“There are things you can’t do with it,” Melanie warned. “It’s no good for cooking eggs, for instance, or baking bread. And you have to be careful what sort of container you cook things in — only certain kinds of glass and ceramics are safe, metal will make it explode and plastic will melt and poison your food. But for the kinds of food it can cook, it’s the best thing since sliced bread.”
They ended up cooking some things in the microwave and others on the stove — which had coils of wire on top which became red-hot when you turned a knob — and served an eclectic but fairly tasty supper to the others after little more than half an hour. By the time everyone was sated, Natalie was anxious to get out and do something else, but most of the others were too tired to go anywhere.
“I’ll take her to a club, maybe,” Melanie said. “Or a movie — we’ll figure out where to go. Are you guys sure none of you want to come?”
“I’ll go,” Keisha said. She was a little tired, but she felt as though she hadn’t gotten as much use out of these wonderful healthy legs as she wanted to.
I'll probably post part four in about a week.
When Wasps Make Honey, the sequel to Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes, is now available from Amazon in Kindle format and from Smashwords in EPUB format. See here for more information.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. An earlier version of this story was serialized on the morpheuscabinet and tg_fiction mailing lists in January 2013.
“If we can recreate this ‘Coke’ from materials to be had in our own world, we will do as much for the happiness of the speaking peoples as if we replicate a steam engine or internal combustion engine.”
This story is set, with Morpheus' permission, in his Travel Agency universe.
This story is set, with Morpheus' permission, in the same setting as his story “The Travel Agency” and its three sequels. Thanks to Morpheus for his feedback on the first draft.
The original stories and this one need not be read in any particular order.
A commenter on a previous chapter remarked that it was hard to keep the scouts' names straight. I'll try to fix that in a future edition. For now, here's a list:
They returned to the minivan, after Melanie admonished the others not to go out until she returned unless it was an emergency, and Melanie drove them back to the downtown district where the buildings were so incredibly tall. It was dark, and they saw above and around them a stunning array of lights from the windows of the buildings, and from illuminated signs declaring the names of shops and restaurants and vaunting the virtues of various merchants' wares. They parked in another of the large buildings full of cars, and walked to a place with particularly garish colored lights in front.
“This place is plenty far enough from the campus that you probably won’t meet anyone who knows your faces,” Melanie said. “I’ve been here a few times, with visitors from your world and with my boyfriend. The drinks are good and the music’s better.”
“I don’t think I’ll drink anything tonight,” Keisha said, with a shudder. “I don’t remember much about last night, but I remember being surprised at how strong your wine is...”
“That wasn’t wine you were drinking,” Melanie said, shaking her head as they got in the back of a queue of people. “I tried to explain, but you didn’t seem to get it. I don’t think you’ve got distilled liquor in your world, do you? Nothing stronger than wine or beer?”
“Some wines are stronger than others, but we have nothing stronger than the best wine.” She thought of the pixie-wine waiting in their saddlebags back home.
“Well, we have a way of taking wine and, um, getting rid of everything except the part that makes you drunk. And then we mix it with a little of something else for flavor, only we usually don’t drink so much of it as you drank with dinner last night...”
The queue moved forward slowly, and finally they were admitted into the “club.” That word had so many meanings that Keisha wasn’t sure what kind of establishment they were going to, until they arrived. Loud music assaulted her ears, strange but exhilarating, played by a group of women not much older than they with strange instruments not entirely unlike lutes or zithers, but connected by wires to boxes on the stage in front of them.
They went to the bar and Melanie ordered glasses of something called “Coke” for each of them. “You don’t have this in your world either, but it won’t make you drunk. It doesn’t have any alcohol in it, just caffeine — the same stuff that’s in tea, but a little stronger — and sugar.”
They drank their Cokes, which were tasty enough but stung the mouth in a curious way with their thousands of tiny bubbles, and listened to the music. It was incomprehensible at first, but the longer Keisha listened to it the better she liked it.
“Wanna dance?” Melanie shouted over the music, when they had nearly finished off their Cokes.
“Sure,” Keisha said, after a moment’s hesitation. She wasn’t sure how to dance the dances of this strange world, or about dancing in a woman’s body; but she did want a chance to really try out what her new legs could do. Natalie agreed enthusiastically, and they moved from the bar into the milling mass of people crowded in front of the musicians.
Keisha needn’t have worried about not knowing the dances of this world. It seemed that no two people were doing the same dance; most of them were moving in time to the music, but not in the same way as any other person. She watched what Melanie did, and imitated her at first, but after getting over some brief self-consciousness as she felt her breasts wobble on her chest, she found herself moving in time to the music with only the most abstract awareness of the people around her. Melanie and Natalie and strangers of both sexes brushed against her frequently, but rarely bumped hard enough to hurt. When the music finally stopped, there was a roaring cheer from the dancers, and Keisha realized after a few moments that she was cheering as well.
“Aren’t they great?” Melanie said in her ear.
“Yeah,” Keisha said. “I’ve never heard music like that, in all the countries I’ve traveled to.”
But it was only now that she’d stopped moving that she realized how exhausted she was. She returned to the stools by the bar and watched Melanie and Natalie dance through the next couple of songs.
After a while the band started playing a slower, quieter song. The man and woman sitting next to Keisha got up and started dancing, a more coordinated, cooperative dance than anything she had seen here yet, with two of their arms extended and hands clasped, her other arm on his shoulder, his other arm on her hip. Keisha smiled to see them; young lovers were so charming... A man, several inches taller than her and with skin just as dark, scooted over from where he’d been sitting onto the seat next to her that the other woman had vacated.
“You here with anyone?” he asked.
“With two friends,” she answered, not fooled for a moment about his intentions. “They’re dancing; I stopped to rest for a few minutes.” For a moment she worried that he might know the real Keisha. But he hadn’t addressed her by name, and as he went on, her fear was alleviated.
“Can I buy you a drink?”
It was plain enough he wanted to seduce her, and even aside from the other Keisha’s request, she didn’t want to sleep with him. But it could do no harm to let him buy her a drink, if it was like the Coke she had drunk earlier; her head was as clear now as it had been before she drunk it, if not clearer. And it would make her her host’s money go further... “Sure,” she said. “A Coke. Or... something else like it, with ‘caffeine’ but no ‘alcohol’.”
“A Jolt for the beautiful sister here,” he said to the tavern wench. Then, to Keisha, “You new in town?”
“Yes.”
“Where’re you from? I was born in Harrisonville, a little bitty place, but I’ve lived here for eight years.”
She hesitated, cursing her imprudence in admitting she wasn’t local. She couldn’t tell him where she was really from, and she didn’t know enough about this world to claim she was from some other city or country in it. She was saved from having to answer at once as the tavern servant brought her a glass of something that looked almost exactly like Coke; it tasted stronger and sweeter, but still nothing like wine.
“Someplace where we don’t have music like this,” she said, gesturing to the stage. “Aren’t they great?”, she added, echoing Melanie.
“Sure,” he said. “You wanna dance?”
“I’m still a little tired from dancing earlier,” she said cautiously, though part of her was curious about what it would feel like to have her hand on his shoulder and his on her hip... while another part firmly warned her of where that could lead. She had borrowed this body in virgin condition, and it would be dishonorable to return it in any other.
“Suit yourself... What kind of music do you listen to when you’re at home?”
She wasn’t sure how to answer that; her world’s musical instruments might be as strange to him as the ones the band on stage were playing were to her. Just then Melanie returned from the dance floor, and kissed her lightly. “Miss me?” she asked.
Keisha was mildly surprised by the informality of this — in her country, only close friends greeted one another with a kiss. But she didn’t read anything sexual into it. The man beside her, however, said: “That kind of friend, huh? I see. Well, see you around.” He got up and wandered off into the crowd.
“I didn’t interrupt anything good, did I?” Melanie asked, sitting on the stool he’d vacated.
“No,” Keisha said. “It was... interesting, at first, to experience how women are treated by men in this world. But he was asking too many questions I didn’t know how to answer.”
“I’m glad I interrupted, then... I hope you don’t mind, but the girls asked me to chaperon you in their bodies. To keep them safe, just like Barsiq is keeping your bodies safe from whatever mischief the girls might get up to in them.”
“I don’t mind, really,” Keisha assured her. “I have no intention of dishonoring my host’s body, and his attentions really were becoming unwelcome.” Except for the Jolt, which she was still sipping and savoring.
“You guys are a lot more fun than Stephanie and the others,” Melanie said, watching Natalie dance. “Especially that Natalie; she’s a wild one!”
“She is an ifrit,” Keisha said. “A good and kind person as ifrits go, a friend to humans and camel-centaurs unlike many of her kind. But still an ifrit. Wild, as you say.”
“You were dancing pretty wild there too,” Melanie said with approval.
“The use of these legs is very welcome,” Keisha said. “I lost my own some years ago.”
“Oh...! What happened?”
“A ghoul. It bit me on one leg, and scratched the other with its claws — fortunately I escaped any direct injury to my trunk, or I would have died. Ul-Kalsim — the one you know as Stephanie — killed it, and cut off my legs above the knees to save me from the ghoul’s rot. I nearly bled to death, and was too weak to lift my arms for many days afterward, but my life was saved.”
“Damn,” Melanie said quietly. “I’m sorry... Then that means that Keisha in your body is paraplegic?”
“I’m afraid so, although my arms are far stronger than they were before my accident — I can lift myself onto a wheeled box or a camel’s back, and even walk on my hands for some distance. I wish I could make it up to her, though; this body is such a wonderful gift.” She turned back toward Natalie. “I am afraid Natalie does not feel the same. She has taken on human shapes before, but she has never been truly human, and I fear that she may be in denial about the limitations of her new body.”
“Oh,” Melanie said. “Maybe... Maybe we’d better go. I don’t want her dropping dead with exhaustion.”
They went out to the dance floor, and Natalie, after only a little persuasion, agreed to return to the apartment. She fell asleep almost instantly once they were in the minivan. Melanie and Keisha spoke quietly so as not to wake her.
“Your Stephanie, ul-Kalsim — she reminds me so much of the real Stephanie. ‘No dancing, thank you, we’re here to learn. No dinosaurs, please, we’ve got to learn how cars work.’ I remember how I used to have to drag her away from her homework to go dancing or go see a movie — she enjoyed it once she got into it, but at first she’d feel guilty that she wasn’t studying.”
“Stephanie — ul-Kalsim, I mean — is our leader. She feels responsible for us, and for...” She was going to say “the success of our mission,” but decided against it. Melanie had already figured out a lot, though.
“So your group is really here to do research on our world, then? Not just sightseeing like most of the other visitors we get. You want to build your own railroads and cars and things?”
“Perhaps. It may be that there is some reason they won’t work in our world, just as your world doesn’t have enough magic to work most of the spells mages can do in ours... but from what I’ve seen at your museum, I don’t see why they shouldn’t work.”
“I hope they do.”
“So... you’ve known Stephanie for some time?”
“We’ve known each other since grade school, but we kind of drifted apart when she went to college and I didn’t. Then I started working for Ms. G., a couple of years ago — the best thing that’s ever happened to me. And last Christmas — that’s a holiday we have in the winter — I saw Stephanie again, and we got caught up, and I told her about what I’d been doing. And she got several of her college friends together to do Spring Break in your world, and here we are.” She sighed. “I wish I could have gone with them, but I used up all my vacation in February, being a mermaid in one of your world’s oceans.”
They returned to the apartment, and gently woke Natalie. She stumbled sleepily up to the door, which Keisha opened with a key from her purse, and they went inside.
“Good night,” Melanie said. “See you tomorrow, about the same time?”
“Sure. Good night.”
Natalie laid down on the couch in her clothes. Keisha pulled her shoes off, loosened the fastenings of her trousers, and covered her with a quilt. She went to the bathroom and emptied the residue of the Coke and Jolt from her bladder, then went into her host’s bedroom. Stephanie was asleep, wearing the “pajamas” she’d worn last night. Keisha undressed in the dim light from the street-lamps out the window, then dug through the drawers and closets looking for pajamas like Stephanie’s. She didn’t find any, and settled for a loose, soft gown.
She laid awake, thinking and fidgeting, for a long while before she finally fell asleep.
Keisha was, not surprisingly, the second to last person to wake up the next morning. She found Stephanie and Lauren eating bread and cheese in the kitchen, while Natalie was still asleep on the sofa; a whoosh of water from the bathroom suggested that Rae Nan was showering.
“We could eat something a little better,” Keisha suggested, “if you two had paid attention when Melanie was demonstrating how to use the stove and microwave.”
“You’re right, we should have,” Stephanie said. “But we were so tired... I don’t know how you and Natalie could keep going after that.”
“It is not to our credit or your fault, I think. Probably our hosts kept their bodies in better shape than those whose bodies you wear.”
“What did you do?”
“We drank strange drinks — do not fear! They were what Melanie calls ‘non-alcoholic’, things that invigorate like strong tea, rather than rendering one drunk. One called Coke, and another called Jolt. And we listened to strange and wonderful music, and danced strange dances.”
Stephanie looked disapproving. “You should have remembered the mission,” she said. “We are here to learn about this world, remember.”
“I know far more about its music than I did,” Keisha retorted, “and its drinks. If we can recreate this ‘Coke’ from materials to be had in our own world, we will do as much for the happiness of the speaking peoples as if we replicate a steam engine or internal combustion engine.”
“Perhaps,” Lauren said soothingly. “Let us investigate each of these avenues in turn. Or perhaps simultaneously; we do not all need to work together on the steam-engine today. Perhaps we could spread out and see, between us, the whole museum — then compare notes and decide which exhibits to study further.”
“That may be good,” Stephanie said. “But I don’t want anyone going off on their own. Stay in groups of at least two.”
Keisha cooked some bacon (which she had tasted in her travels in the north, though none of the others had) to go with her bread and cheese. Rae Nan came out of the bathroom, and Lauren followed her.
Finally Natalie sat up, blinking, threw off the quilt, and followed her nose to the kitchen. She silently helped herself to bacon, bread, and cheese, and ate most of it before she woke up enough to thank Keisha for cooking it.
“Did you enjoy being human, last night?”
“I enjoyed dancing enough to forget I was human, for a time,” Natalie said with a faint smile. “You seemed to enjoy it, too.”
“I did indeed; having legs again, if only for a few days, is an indescribable happiness.”
“Who was the man I saw you speaking with?”
Stephanie looked alert at that.
“Some man who found my body attractive... I politely brushed him off, with help from Melanie.”
“I saw him at the museum, too.”
“What?” Stephanie said suddenly. “Tell me more about him, both of you!”
“He has dark skin like Keisha or Lauren, and he’s perhaps three inches taller than Keisha,” Natalie said. “He didn’t say anything to me at the museum, although I saw him two or three times, in different rooms and halls. Last night I saw him approach Keisha and speak with her, then leave when Melanie returned and spoke to them.”
“Hmm. What did he say to you, exactly?” Stephanie asked Keisha.
“He... he asked me if I was new to the city, and where I was from. I gave him a vague answer, changing the subject to the music we were listening to. He asked if I wanted to dance, and I said no... I think that is all.”
“You told him you were from somewhere else?”
“Yes, but not where.”
“Hmm. Tell me at once if you see him again. It may have been coincidence that he visited the museum and the same tavern as you, in the same day; but this is a vast city — I estimate that it has at least twice, perhaps three times as many people as the sultan’s capital. Odds are he followed you somehow.”
“I fear you are right... I did not recognize him. I did not see him at the museum, or perhaps did not notice him because I was studying the car engine or steam engine displays. But if I see him again I will certainly know him.”
When Melanie arrived, they had all showered except for Natalie, who was just going into the bathroom as their guide arrived. They returned to the museum and, as Lauren had suggested, broke into groups of two to spread out and see everything at least briefly before meeting up for lunch. Keisha accompanied Lauren, and they spent most of the morning looking at the dinosaur skeletons, reading the placards describing them, and watching a fascinating “film”, a moving series of images, depicting what they had looked like when they were alive. Stephanie and Melanie, and Rae Nan and Natalie, spent most of their time in the halls displaying and explaining various machines.
While they ate lunch, Stephanie was displeased to hear how Lauren and Keisha had spent their time.
“If these dinosaurs have been dead for millions of years, as you say, of what importance are they? We need to understand this world as it is now.”
“Its history is important to understanding its present, just as in our own world. One who knows no history will not understand why the elves hate the dwarves, or why the pixies of the desert brew wine while those of the northern forests do not...”
“Never mind,” Stephanie said impatiently. “This afternoon I want you to look at a machine called a ‘printing press’ with me. I think it may be the sort of thing we can build at home, like the steam engine.”
“Probably easier,” Melanie said. “We invented printing presses around five hundred years ago, and steam engines only two hundred years ago.”
“You see how important history is,” Lauren returned quietly. She had learned that the restaurant they were visiting served the ‘Coke’ which Keisha had extolled, and was trying it out, to her great delight.
“Did you understand how the humans learned of these dinosaurs, and when they lived?” Natalie asked. “We ifrits pass down stories of times before humans or camel-centaurs appeared, but if there was anyone who lived in our world before the ifrits, we do not know. I read the placards by the dinosaur skeletons yesterday, but did not understand most of what they said.”
“I don’t fully understand it either,” Lauren said after a long swig of Coke. “They have some alchemy by which they can determine the age of those petrified skeletons they dig out of the ground. Something about the different natures of the rocks that surround them... But beyond that I must confess myself mystified.”
“Do you want to spend the whole rest of your stay in the science museum?” Melanie asked. “There are other educational things we could do, if you’d rather. The history museum, like I said, or the walking tour of the historic district, where the oldest houses in the city are.”
“A walking tour sounds interesting,” Keisha said. Walking around the museum wasn’t giving her legs enough play to suit her.
“Perhaps you could bring some of us to the Science and Technology Museum tomorrow morning,” Stephanie said, “and take others to the history museum or the historic district before returning for us. But if we are to be so separated, I want three of us in each group.”
“I’ll go with Keisha and Melanie,” Natalie said. Lauren looked as though she wanted to go as well, but didn’t argue.
Stephanie, Lauren and Keisha spent the rest of that afternoon studying the workings of the printing press. Natalie kept watch to see if the man she had seen the day before would return; he did not. Melanie and Rae Nan spent some time looking at the dinosaur skeletons, then at stuffed exemplars of other, living animal species — many of which Rae Nan didn’t recognize, but wasn’t sure if they might live in some distant region of her world. Melanie said she had seen a few of them in her visits to their world, mainly in the north.
They ate supper at the apartment again, and again, Keisha and Natalie were keen to go out to a club and dance. “Try to get back earlier tonight,” Stephanie said. “Sleeping late this morning, you delayed our departure for the museum.”
“We’ll be good,” Keisha promised.
Melanie took them to a different club, in another part of the city. It was more spacious, and the dance floor was less crowded, at least at first — as the evening progressed, more people arrived and it became more crowded. Keisha turned down several men who asked her to dance with them; Natalie didn’t turn down the men who asked her, but (cautioned by Melanie) she didn’t dance more than once with any of them.
After a couple of hours and a couple of drinks, Keisha needed to go to the restroom, and did so, without interrupting Melanie or Natalie to tell them where she was going. She had washed her hands and was just leaving the restroom when she ran into a woman who looked vaguely familiar. As she apologized, she realized where she’d seen her: at the museum. She’d been in the room with the printing press exhibit... Keisha had a bad feeling about this, but before she could think of what to do, the woman put a hand on her neck. There was a brief sting, and she felt woozy. The woman supported her to keep her from falling, and walked her down the hall away from the bar and dance floor, through a door marked “Employees Only.” Keisha couldn’t remember, later, what happened after that.
I'll probably post part five in about a week.
When Wasps Make Honey, the sequel to Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes, is now available from Smashwords in EPUB format and from Amazon in Kindle format. See here for more information.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. An earlier version of this story was serialized on the morpheuscabinet and tg_fiction mailing lists in January 2013.
“Who are you and what have you done with the real Keisha Grant?”
This story is set, with Morpheus' permission, in his Travel Agency universe.
This story is set, with Morpheus' permission, in the same setting as his story “The Travel Agency” and its three sequels. Thanks to Morpheus for his feedback on the first draft.
The original stories and this one need not be read in any particular order.
A commenter on a previous chapter remarked that it was hard to keep the scouts' names straight. I'll try to fix that in a future edition. For now, here's a list:
She found herself, still dressed in the same clothes, lying on a narrow, hard bed in a small white room. Not Tariq’s room at home, nor Keisha’s bedroom in the apartment; it had no furniture but the bed, one of this world’s self-cleaning chamber pots in a corner without the usual screen around it, and a washbasin. She sat up and looked blearily around her for an indeterminate time. Her left arm felt slightly sore; she looked and saw that there was a bandage stuck with some kind of glue to the sore spot, in the crook of her arm. She stood up and went to the door.
It wouldn’t open. There wasn’t even a handle on the inside.
She banged on the door a few times, with no immediate effect.
She peed, washed her hands — with only water; there was no soap — then drank a little, cupping water in her hands and raising them to her mouth. Then, finding nothing else to do, she sat on the bed and thought.
Twice she and Natalie had seen someone at the museum, and then the same person at a club. It seemed likely that the man who’d approached and talked to her the night before last was working with the woman; they’d been more or less circumspectly following them from place to place. But who were they and why were they interested in them — or her? Did they suspect that they were visitors from another world? Or were they enemies of the real Keisha? She knew nearly nothing about Keisha, except that she was a college student, and had a boyfriend but wasn’t sleeping with him... and, of course, that she was friends with Stephanie.
There was a rattle at the door; she jumped up, but it opened almost before she was on her feet. There were a man and woman in the doorway — the woman was the person who had drugged her at the club last night; the man she didn’t recognize.
“Come with us,” the man said. She followed them, looking for a chance to escape.
The hallway they walked along was windowless. She had no idea in what direction the outside doors might be. After a short distance they led her into a larger room, with a table and several chairs. They gestured for her to take a seat in one of the chairs, and she did; they didn’t sit, but stood on either side of the door.
“Why did you bring me here?” she asked. They remained silent.
“Who are you?” Again, no answer.
A short time later, another two men entered the room. One was the dark-skinned man who had asked her to dance the night before last; the other was lighter skinned and older, with receding gray hair.
“Ms. Grant,” the older man said. “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“What about? Why did you bring me here?” She remembered now that Keisha had signed her note with a two-part name, “Keisha Grant.”
“I said we’ll ask questions, not answer them. A few days ago you paid $500, via MasterCard, to an organization known only as ‘The Travel Agency.’ Why?”
She thought back to things Melanie had said about the Gray One’s organization and the visitors... “For a vacation.”
“Yes, that would be very natural, would it not? You asked your employer for six days off work while the university was on Spring Break — natural enough — and on the first day of Spring Break, you pay a travel agency for what will show up on your next month’s credit card bill as a ‘unique destination package’. That’s natural enough, too. Except that you then proceed to stay at home, going to the Science and Technology Museum with some of your friends, going out clubbing, and inviting your friends over for a sleepover. You could have done all that without paying the travel agency anything. You’re not even getting any discount on your museum ticket. That’s a little odd, don’t you think?”
“It may be odd, but why is it your business?”
“I said we were here to ask questions, not answer them. When you spoke to my friend Mr. Wilson here at the Vortex, night before last, you told him you were new in town.”
“Yes...”
“Although you’ve lived here all your life?”
“...I don’t feel any obligation to tell the truth to a stranger who is transparently trying to seduce me.”
“Touché. That might not be odd in isolation, but... You said they didn’t have music like that where you came from. The Wild Girls are said to be pretty good — I am only repeating what the music critics say in the newspaper; I haven’t heard them myself — but are they really so unusual, so beyond your experience? Your credit card records show a number of concert tickets in the last three years.”
“What can I say? They were good. I enjoyed dancing to their music, and so did my friends.”
“Including, I note, a Yeah Yeah Yeahs concert five months ago. Do you remember that?”
Of course Keisha didn’t remember that, but she made something up: “They were pretty good too.”
“...At which the Wild Girls were the opening act.”
Keisha wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but the man seemed to think it was important.
“You’ve asked me several questions, but the question I find most interesting is one you haven’t asked. Would you care to guess what it is?”
Keisha thought. “Where are my friends? Did you do something to them too?”
“Bzzt! Wrong answer. No, we haven’t detained your friends — yet. I’m puzzled about why you haven’t asked to see a lawyer.”
Keisha got a vague sense of what a lawyer was, hearing the word for the first time; someone who defended accused criminals when they were before a tribunal... She thought she realized what he was implying: that she was an accused criminal — but accused of what?
“What are you accusing me of?”
“Nothing, as yet. I simply find it odd that a political science major, on being detained like this, doesn’t ask for a lawyer first thing.”
“I do want a lawyer.”
“We’ll take that into consideration. Do you recognize this person?” He took a small slip of paper from his shirt pocket and pushed it across the table toward her. It was a very detailed, realistic colored drawing of a dark-skinned woman. Was it some criminal the real Keisha Grant was suspected of consorting with? Or one of her relatives, used as a test to see if she was the real Keisha Grant? She suspected the latter, but if she guessed wrong...
“Yes.”
“Who is she?”
“My mother.” It seemed much the most likely possibility, but —
“Oh, dear. Who are you and what have you done with the real Keisha Grant?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I suspect the real Keisha Grant, talking to a strange man at a club about the Wild Girls, would boast of having seen them in concert before. I am reasonably certain that the real Keisha Grant would immediately ask to see a lawyer in this situation. For that matter, almost any American citizen would do so. And I am perfectly certain that the real Keisha Grant would not mistake her high school history teacher for her mother!”
“I won’t answer any more questions.” There was no longer any sense in trying to fool them; they knew who she wasn’t, but she could still hope to keep them from finding out who she was. They’d start torturing her soon, of course — probably they would even rape her, she thought with trepidation — but she thought she could hold out. Not forever, but until the Gray One found her and rescued her...
“You’re not only not the real Keisha Grant, you’re not even a good imitation of her. The real Keisha Grant has consistently gotten good grades in history and the social sciences, but barely passing grades in science and math. Why the sudden interest in the technology museum? Not just visiting the museum during Spring Break, when other girls your age are at the beach, but spending hours on end studying certain exhibits.”
She said nothing.
“And yet... as implausible an imitation as you are in knowledge and behavior, you’re an uncanny imitation physically. You even have her fingerprints. How was that done, I’d like to know?”
Stony silence. She wondered what fingerprints were.
“We’ve had our eye on the person who runs this travel agency for some time. A fair number of his customers — it seems to be the ones who purchase the ‘unique destination package’, whose price varies widely — exhibit strange behavior, not unlike yours, for some time after visiting him. Or it is her? There seem to be several different people, men and women of different races and ages, all doing business under the name Mr. or Ms. G.
“They purchase this ‘unique destination package’, and then — they remain at home. Or at most they visit minor tourist attractions less than a hundred miles away. And when our agents observe them, they seem to be unfamiliar, at first, with basic, everyday things. What have you noticed, Mr. Wilson?”
“They all seem surprised at cars, at first,” the other man said. “And they stare up at the tall buildings, like hicks from Podunk visiting Manhattan — even ones who’ve lived in the city their whole lives, like Ms. Grant here. And I’d swear that this person who claims to be Ms. Grant had never tasted a carbonated soft drink before the night I spoke with her.”
“Care to comment on that, Ms. Grant?” the older man asked. When she said nothing, he went on:
“In fact, it seems that the only thing they get from the travel agency is the company of an employee of the travel agency. Such as this Melanie Peterson who’s been accompanying you to the museum, restaurants and clubs for the last few days, — chauffeuring you in a minivan with license plates registered to the travel agency.”
“Melanie’s a long-time friend of Stephanie,” Keisha said. “That’s how I met her. I like hanging out with her.”
The older man questioning her looked taken aback by that. He said to Mr. Wilson: “Check that out, would you? See if there’s any evidence that Ms. Peterson already knew Ms. Urquhart before last Saturday.” Mr. Wilson nodded and left the room. The older man was silent for a few moments, seemingly gathering his thoughts, then continued:
“If you’re traveling to a place you’ve never been, of course it makes sense that you would hire a local guide to show you around and help you avoid mistakes that foreigners might make because of their wrong assumptions. But why hire a local guide to your own hometown? Or, in the case of some of your friends, to a town you’ve lived in for at least three years — when you’ve got friends who’ve lived there their whole lives and can show you around just as well for free?”
“I don’t know as much about the science and technology as Melanie does,” Keisha offered, though she suspected she had no chance of convincing them... still, saying something innocuous might postpone the moment when they resorted to torture.
“That may be. But it still puzzles me, when, as poor as Keisha Grant’s grades were in science and math, Melanie’s were frequently worse. She outright failed some of those courses in high school; and you — if you’re really Keisha — have at least had exposure to college-level physics and algebra, which she hasn’t.
“So — back to our observations about Mr. G.‘s customers. They behave strangely for some time, and are accompanied almost constantly by a local guide to a city they’ve lived in for some time. Then, after some time — it varies from a few days to a month — his customers seem to get used to things again. They go back to their routines — never having left for any particular destination, unique or otherwise. Their guide, if that’s what these people are, takes some time off work and then starts accompanying some other of Mr. G.’s customers.
“Can you explain to me what’s going on here? Because I have a suspicion, and I don’t like it.”
Keisha remained silent; at the moment, she couldn’t think of anything more plausible than the truth, and she certainly wasn’t going to tell him that.
“I think Mr. G. is quietly doing away with a few of his customers. And he’s replacing them, somehow, with others. Let’s call them pod people, shall we?” He paused, as if expecting that Keisha would react to that term somehow, but she hid her puzzlement. She’d gotten good at hiding her puzzlement, the last few days. “These replacements look and sound exactly like the people they’re replacing, but they don’t know everything they should right away. It takes them a few days to a month to learn enough to convincingly imitate the original person in the company of their friends and coworkers — or perhaps to assimilate some stolen memories?”
Keisha suppressed a smile at the man’s nearly right but ever so wrong guesses.
“And while they’re learning to do that, they take a ‘staycation,’ and are constantly accompanied by one of Mr. G.‘s employees. Nearly all of whom, I might add, are former customers of Mr. G., having at some time bought one of his ’unique destination packages.'
“I think Mr. G. has been infiltrating a number of agents of a foreign power into the U.S. Agents of a very foreign power, shall we say? Someone who has the technology to change their agents into perfect simulacra of our citizens, even down to the fingerprints, but whose agents are surprisingly unfamiliar with cars, skyscrapers, and carbonated beverages. Can you tell me what country on Earth has one of those technologies but not the others? And if not, where might these agents be coming from?”
Keisha still remained silent. So, for a long while, did the older man. The guards by the door stood very still; Keisha and her interrogator fidgeted and shifted in their chairs from time to time, but neither spoke.
Finally, he said: “You’ll talk eventually. Or we’ll learn what we need to know another way.” He rose from the chair and went to the door, saying something in a low tone to the guards by the door as he went out.
The guards waited a few moments after he left, then told Keisha to come with them. She rose and followed the male guard out the door, and was followed by the female guard. They took her down the hallway toward the room she’d woken up in.
Suddenly she turned, dodged past the female guard, and ran the other way. The female guard shouted, and Keisha heard both of them running after her, though she didn’t look back. She reached a corner where the hall dead-ended into another, and hesitated a moment too long before choosing a direction. In that moment the male guard, with his longer stride, caught up with her and took first one of her arms, then the other, in a powerful grip. She struggled and tried to kick him, but couldn’t get good leverage. And she felt clumsy; Tariq’s fighting skills had been rusting for six years since he lost his legs, and Keisha’s body had apparently never had those skills.
“We’re under orders not to hurt you unless you make it necessary,” he said, as he twisted her arms behind her and she cried out in pain. “You just made it necessary.” He spoke to the other guard, and she fastened a pair of manacles around Keisha’s wrists, behind her back.
They led her back to the cell she’d woken up in, removed the manacles, and left her. While she’d been questioned, someone had brought in a tray of food and a large cup of water, sitting it on the floor by the bed. She ate and drank — it was bland, but apparently not drugged — then examined the room carefully. There was no light switch to control the overhead lamp, as in Keisha’s apartment. There was a grille overhead from which fresh air came, but it was far too high for her to jump to, or to reach by climbing on the bed, toilet or sink. And it looked too narrow for her to fit through, even if she could remove the grille from the air duct. There was a small glass window set into the door, giving a view of the empty corridor, but when she tried to break it with the empty food tray, she didn’t even scratch it.
Finally she laid down on the bed. It took a long time, but she eventually slept.
Some time later she was awakened by a female guard — not the same one who had captured her at the club — shaking her. “Get up,” the woman said. “Come on.” She was taller than the average woman, much taller than Keisha. “Pee and poop if you need to, then come with me.”
Humiliated, Keisha lowered her trousers and sat on the chamber-pot, covering her crotch with her hands as the tall woman stared at her impassively. Her business done, she ran water over her hands.
“Enough — come on.” The woman took her by the wrist and pulled her toward the door, which opened as they approached it. Another guard, a man even taller than the woman, was in the corridor. He accompanied them down the hall to another room, but when the woman opened another door and led Keisha into what seemed to be a large restroom, he didn’t follow them.
“Undress,” the woman said, finally letting go of Keisha’s wrist. “There’s a shower there, and soap and shampoo.” Indeed, one corner of the large room had shower nozzles set high in the wall, and just below it, faucets similar to the ones in the bathtub in Keisha’s apartment. Keisha slowly undressed, then went to the shower and turned on the faucets. She couldn’t get really hot water, but she scrubbed herself with both the solid and liquid soaps and rinsed off. The bandage on her arm, after getting wet, came loose and fell off. There was no curtain or screening wall, so she could see, while she bathed, the woman gathering her discarded clothes into a large cloth bag, and taking towels and other clothes from another bag.
“Dry off, then put this on,” the woman said, handing her the towels and holding up an orange one-piece garment. It took Keisha some time to figure out how to put it on, and the woman finally helped her impatiently — she had to step into the legs of it backward, and then seal up the front with a fastener like the ones on her trousers, but longer. There was no underwear.
“Anybody’d think you’d never seen a zipper before,” the guard said, and suddenly Keisha knew what that interlocking fastener was called. “Come on, shoes now. We’ve got somewhere to be.” The shoes were softer than the ones she’d had before, of an orange to match the other garment.
The guard, with her male colleague who’d been waiting outside, led her back to the room with the table and chairs, sat her down, and manacled her to the chair. The guards waited by the door until Mr. Wilson appeared.
“Good morning,” he said. “Did you sleep well?”
“As well as I could with the bright lights.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, patently insincere; “we’ll have to do something about that. If you tell us what we need to know. Have you thought about what we said yesterday?”
She had thought about it. “I want a lawyer,” she said.
“American citizens get lawyers when they’re accused of a crime,” he said. “You’re obvious not an American, whatever you are. We’re not obligated to give you a lawyer. But we can give you other things, if you cooperate with us. Tell us, who is Mr. G.? Where is he from? Where are you from?”
She said nothing, wondering how much longer it would be before they started torturing her, how long she could hold out, how long it would take the Gray One to find her... What if this place were in an area with no magic? Perhaps she would be helpless to save her.
“What did he do with the real Keisha Grant? Is she dead?”
Silence.
“Did Mr. G. take her back to your home planet?” There was that word again — Melanie had promised to show them an exhibit at the museum that explained it, but they’d been too busy studying the workings of the marvelous engines. It meant something like “world,” but not exactly the same...
“Are they doing experiments on her, or using her for slave labor?”
Silence.
“Or is she right there in front of me, a helpless passenger in her own body? If we can’t get you talk, we’ll have to find out what we need to know some other way. Maybe we’ll cut you out of her skull, and leave the real Keisha free again — a bit damaged, probably, but free. We don’t want to do that if we can help it, though.”
Silence. Keisha was already a little hungry when she got up; by now she was was famished.
“How does Mr. G. do it? Give you those human-looking bodies, with just the right fingerprints?”
“I want something to eat,” she said. “And drink.”
“Tell us what we need to know — even just a little bit — and you’ll get the best food we can offer, right away. Keep stonewalling, and you’ll get some basic prisoner chow in a few hours.”
She remained silent.
He asked several more questions, repeats of what the older man had asked the day before, and then sat silent, waiting for her to talk. She thought and thought about what, if any, plausible lies she could tell, something that might at least temporarily satisfy them and postpone the worse torture they must be planning. Finally she said:
“I’m starting to remember...”
“Go on...?”
“We’re not really from another place,” she said. “We just feel like we are, for a while. What’s the strangest place you could possibly go? Your own home, if you don’t recognize it. Ms. G. has a way to make you feel like a stranger at home. Everything seems new and exciting, like you’re a traveler in a strange land. Of course you might make dangerous mistakes, while a lot of your memories are temporarily suppressed, so he assigns us guides to chaperon us until our memories come back.”
“Hmm. How does he do it? Drugs? Hypnosis?”
“A little of both, maybe. I’m not sure, it’s a trade secret. I don’t really remember what he did to me, after he explained in general what he was going to do. I was a little worried, but Stephanie said her friend Melanie had tried it and it was perfectly safe, so I went along.”
“Huh.” Mr. Wilson looked flummoxed — maybe he believed her? He mulled over what she’d said for a while, and said: “I’m not sure if I believe you, but it gives me a testable hypothesis. If you’re lying, you’ll regret it. If you’re telling the truth, then some of your memories should be coming back.”
“Not much,” she said. “Just the most recent ones — from right before Ms. G. suppressed them.”
“Well, they’ll come back in a few days... Or maybe the alien parasite in Keisha Grant’s skull will finally assimilate her memories. But we’re going to test for that, too. Anyway, this is better than nothing. You can eat now.” He left the room, and the guards returned her to her cell. Soon they returned with another tray of food, a little tastier than what she’d had before, but not as good as at the restaurants Melanie had taken them to.
She was fed again some while later. Then the lights in her cell dimmed, but didn’t go out entirely. She slept.
I'll probably post part six in about a week.
When Wasps Make Honey, the sequel to Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes, is now available from Smashwords in EPUB format and from Amazon in Kindle format. See here for more information.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. An earlier version of this story was serialized on the morpheuscabinet and tg_fiction mailing lists in January 2013.
Would it not work with her so far from the Gray One’s office? This place must be empty of magic, or the Gray One would have rescued her by now — perhaps the return spell would not work here.
This story is set, with Morpheus' permission, in his Travel Agency universe.
This story is set, with Morpheus' permission, in the same setting as his story “The Travel Agency” and its three sequels. Thanks to Morpheus for his feedback on the first draft.
The original stories and this one need not be read in any particular order.
A commenter on a previous chapter remarked that it was hard to keep the scouts' names straight. I'll try to fix that in a future edition. For now, here's a list:
The next day, instead of asking her questions, they poked and prodded her body. One of the female guards brought her a tray of food when she woke her, and a flimsy blue-white gown, telling her to change into it. After she had eaten and changed clothes — the gown wasn’t long enough to cover her legs, and it was difficult to get it to cover her back and butt — the guard came back and took her down several hallways, around several corners, to a room where an older woman in a white coat was sitting.
“Lie down on the table there,” the older woman said. Keisha did as she was told. Her guard stood by the door while the woman fixed her legs into restraints — she braced herself; now would come the torture...
The woman put on gloves, then meddled none too gently with Keisha’s female parts, finally poking metal instruments deep into her insides. It was quite uncomfortable, and extremely humiliating, but she thought that if they were trying to cause her pain, they could do it a lot more efficiently. And the torturer didn’t even ask her any questions — or none to the point, none like the men had been asking her. Only “When was your last period?” and a few others like it. Keisha said she couldn’t remember. After that, the woman prodded her in various other places, looking into her mouth, nose and ears, and shone bright light into her eyes, but only briefly.
The guard then escorted her a short way down the hall to another room, and told her to stand between two large humming machines and hold very still. In another nearby room a man and woman strapped her to a table (now the real torture, she thought); but it was nothing to the tortures Tariq had more than once endured at the hands of the sultan’s enemies, or even the cold metal instruments poking into her vagina. They only slid the table she was strapped to into a huge ring-shaped machine and it made whirring noises while red lights flashed. She grew uncomfortable from being forced to lie in the same position for a long time, and little twinges of pain followed, but just when she was starting to panic and try to think of something to tell them to make them stop, the whirring noises ceased, the table slid out, and they unstrapped her. The guards led her back to the cell, where another meal awaited her; she changed back into the orange one-piece garment before she ate.
With no windows, she was uncertain how much time had passed; but she thought that her sleep after that meal was a long one, and it was the next morning. She woke to find that another tray had been left in her cell. Some while after she ate, the guards escorted her to the interrogation room again, but didn’t manacle her to the chair. The older man who’d questioned her before came in soon after.
“Mr. Wilson tells me that you claim Mr. G. induced a kind of recreational amnesia,” he said. “And all the tests we’ve done suggest that you’re human. The blood tests even show you have human DNA, though we’re still trying to track down a confirmed sample of the real Keisha’s DNA to compare it with.”
“I am human,” she said. That bit of the truth wouldn’t hurt.
“How much have you remembered?”
“Not much. I think I’d have to be out there, seeing my apartment and my home city every day, for the memories to come back.”
“How much do you know about how Mr. G.'s process works?”
“Nothing. I remember that he explained what he was going to do — but not how — and then the next thing I remember is looking around at my friends and the room we were in, being surprised at everything... Even my body, for a few minutes.”
“What did you expect your body to look like?”
“I’m not sure.”
The man was silent for a time.
“If there’s a chance you’re telling the truth, you present us with a dilemma. We don’t want to hurt an American citizen who’s guilty of nothing worse than falling prey to a quack psychologist, using non-FDA-approved methods to induce a dangerous amnesia. But if you’re the foreign agent we still suspect you to be, we can’t safely let you go — not now that you know we know about you. The other agents — if that’s what they are — are no great danger to us as long as we know what they are and they don’t know we know. So we’ll be keeping you here for a while longer. We can’t let you go out, but we can show you photos and films of your apartment and various places around the university and the city. Perhaps they will trigger the return of your memories, and you can convince us you are truly Keisha Grant, and we can let you go.”
“I hope so.”
If she hadn’t lost track of the days, tomorrow should be the day the scouts returned to their own world. Would she and the original Keisha swap back then? If so, she could probably convince her captors of her real identity and get them to let her go, and Tariq could go home from the foothills with a clear conscience. Or would it not work with her body so far from the Gray One’s office? This place must be empty of magic, or the Gray One would have rescued her by now — perhaps the return spell would not work here.
After returning her to her cell to eat, the guards brought her to another room, and another strange device produced images of light on the wall. A few she recognized as scenes from around the city, but most were unfamiliar.
The next day, they brought her back there and showed her more still images, followed by moving pictures like the simulated dinosaurs she had seen at the museum. Again, only a few of them looked slightly familiar.
The next day, more of the same. She was sure that she should have returned by now; the return spell hadn’t worked. Would her friends have gone home? Or would they insist on staying to help the Gray One search for and rescue her, or search for her on their own? The Gray One might have power to compel them to return in time, if they were in an area where magic worked, and not borrow their hosts' bodies longer than was agreed upon...
After a few hours of watching those images, as she was getting hungry, she was taken back to the interrogation room. Another man she hadn’t seen before came in a little later and questioned her. He repeated most of the questions the older man and Mr. Wilson had asked her, but in a more aggressive tone. She stuck to her story that Mr. G. had suppressed her memories to allow her to experience her home town as though it were a foreign city; but this man clearly didn’t believe her and kept interrupting her with more questions, some of which she didn’t understand. (“How many light-years away is your home planet?”, for instance, left her utterly baffled.) She was finally returned to her cell without anything to eat. That night they didn’t dim the lights; she slept fitfully.
The next morning one of the guards woke her up and dragged her down the hall to the interrogation room without a meal. She was kept waiting there for some time, then the same man as the day before questioned her for several hours. When he left, she was given a meal, but it was taken away before she had eaten her fill, and another man came in and questioned her further. She hadn’t slept enough, and was getting confused; sometimes she wasn’t sure if she had answered aloud or only thought something.
Some time after she was returned to her cell and managed to fall into an exhausted sleep in spite of the bright lights, one of the female guards woke her. She expected to be taken to the interrogation room again, but instead the guards simply led her on a long walk around the halls, then returned her to her cell. She slept again, and woke again to find a guard she hadn’t seen in several days shaking her shoulder.
“Shh,” the guard said. “It’s me, Melanie. We’re here to get you out of here. Just keep quiet and pretend you’re still a prisoner.” Keisha rose, uncomprehending. The guard looked nothing like Melanie, but perhaps it was a disguise spell?
“I have to put these on you to make it look plausible,” Melanie said apologetically, holding up a pair of manacles. “I’ll try not to make them too tight.” She fitted them to Keisha’s wrists, binding them in front of her body this time. “Mr. G.'s outside, in the body of the guy who chatted you up at the Vortex. Just be cool and we’ll be out of here in a little while.”
They emerged from the cell to find Mr. Wilson in the hall, or the Gray One in his body. He and Melanie led her down the hall without a word to an elevator like the ones they had ridden in the parking decks downtown. She felt heavy, like she had felt when the elevators were taking them up to the story where Melanie had left the minivan, and then the door opened. She followed them down a series of further halls, and then — into a room with windows! It was daylight outside, either early morning or late evening. The Gray one spoke to a couple of guards, and showed them a small card he took from his pocket; then he and Melanie led Keisha out into a parking lot. They put her in the back of a van, with darkened windows and a grille between the benches in back and the front area where the driver and his companion sat.
“We have to make it look plausible until we’re away from here, I’m afraid,” the Gray One said in a low voice. “We’ll stop and take off your manacles as soon as we’re out of danger.”
Keisha couldn’t see much from her vantage point. They moved slowly and stopped and started several times, and she heard the Gray One talking to people outside the van through his window. Finally they sped up to the usual road speed these cars traveled at. By now her lack of sleep was catching up to her; she fell asleep.
When she woke, the back of the van was open and Melanie in the guard’s body was gently touching her shoulder. The manacles were already off. The Gray One was standing outside the van, looking at them.
“Are you strong enough to walk?” Melanie asked.
“Yeah, I think so...” Keisha got up and climbed out of the van, followed by Melanie. She still felt sleepy, but a little better than she’d felt earlier.
They were near a two-story brick house, surrounded on all sides by trees. A narrow dirt road, unlike the black-surfaced roads she’d seen elsewhere in this world, ran from the front of the house away into the trees, turning as it went out of sight; at the end of the road near the house was not only the large boxy van they’d rescued her in, but the smaller gray minivan that Melanie had driven the scouts around in. If it weren’t for the large glass windows in the house, and the vans, she might have thought she was somewhere in the northern kingdoms of her own world.
“Let’s get you inside,” the Gray One said, leading the way to the house and unlocking the door. “Do you still need to sleep? Or would you rather eat first?”
“I’ll eat a little,” Keisha said, “but I need to sleep some more too. Are you going to send me back to my own body and world, or is it too late now that I missed the right time?”
“I can still do it, but I need to ask you some questions first, about the people who captured you and what they did to you. And I want your body to be rested and fed before I put the original Keisha back into it.”
“Thank you for getting me out of there,” Keisha said.
They fed her two “sandwiches,” slices of meat, vegetables and cheese enclosed between slices of bread; she ate voraciously, and then asked if she could sleep for a while before she answered the Gray One’s questions. Melanie showed her to a bedroom, where she removed the hateful orange suit, crawled under the sheets and blankets, and fell almost instantly asleep.
When she woke, she found that some clothes and underwear that fit her had replaced the discarded orange suit. She got dressed and went out into the living room, and was pleasantly surprised to see Melanie back to her usual appearance, or back in her own body. The Gray One was again the gray-haired older woman she’d been when Keisha and the other scouts first arrived.
“Did you sleep well?” the Gray One asked.
“Yes, thank you. I could eat something more, though, if you don’t mind.”
They had been cooking, and they served her a plate of roast chicken and baked vegetables. While she was eating, they told her what had happened after she was captured.
“I saw you heading toward the restroom, and I didn’t worry about you at first,” Melanie said. “But when you didn’t come back after a while, I got nervous, and Natalie and I went to look for you. We didn’t find you in the restroom, or anywhere in the club, or in the alley or the parking lot. So I called Ms. G.'s emergency number, and — she didn’t answer.”
“I was in your world at the time,” the Gray One said. “I’m terribly sorry. I spend most of my time in this world, these days, and if I’d been here when Melanie called, perhaps I could have found you before your captors got very far with you. But by the time I returned to this world and saw the telephone message Melanie had left, they had removed you to the place we found you — or at least, they had already removed you from the low-magic area around the club.”
“She couldn’t find you directly with her magic — all she could tell was that you were somewhere in a no-magic area. But we had a lead — Natalie had seen that guy who was following you around, and when she described him, Ms. G. was able to use a spell to try to find him.”
“Mr. Wilson,” Keisha said, her mouth full of chicken.
“That’s one of the names he uses,” the Gray One said. “The finding spell didn’t work at first; he was probably in the same no-magic area as you. But I kept it running, and eventually he entered an area with a little magic. I found him then, and followed him around until he went back to the place they were holding you. We weren’t sure then that you were there, but it seemed likely. We — not just Melanie and I, but your friends as well — watched the people coming and going from that place; Natalie and Rae Nan recognized a couple of people they had seen at the museum or one of the clubs, including the woman whose body Melanie was wearing when we rescued you.
“The next time any of the people we’d been watching entered a high-magic area, I captured them and picked through their memories to learn what had become of you. I couldn’t have done that a year ago, but as our worlds get closer together, magic gets stronger in this world, and more and more magic areas appear. Then I altered their memories to make them forget they had seen me, and... did some other tinkering. And I let them go — all except for two, whose bodies Melanie and I borrowed for our rescue mission.”
“But by then your friends had gone home,” Melanie said. “They didn’t want to, but Ms. G. promised she’d get you back, and said it was safer and easier for them to go back at the scheduled time. The real Lauren and the others were horrified when they found out what happened to you, but we told them we’d rescue you, and then get their friend Keisha back into her own body and you into yours, in another few days.”
Keisha told them how she had woken up in the cell, and been questioned, and remained silent at first, but then came up with the cover story.
“What a wonderful idea!” the Gray One said, delighted. “I got some of that from Mr. Wilson’s memories, when I was learning how to impersonate him convincingly, but it wasn’t entirely clear. Perhaps I will find that a useful cover story from time to time. — Go on.”
“So at first they seemed to believe me, and they did a bunch of things to me to figure out if I was really human. I wasn’t sure what else they thought I might be; Melanie said there aren’t any other speaking peoples in this world. But then another man started questioning me, and I didn’t see Mr. Wilson or the older man any more — I guess that might have been when you captured Mr. Wilson. And this other man didn’t believe my story, and kept asking the same questions over and over, and others I didn’t understand. And they stopped feeding me regularly, or very much when they did feed me, and they didn’t let me sleep much... by the last session when they questioned me, yesterday or maybe the day before, I was really confused from lack of sleep, and I think I might have told them something about where I was really from, but I’m not sure. If I did, I probably didn’t say it very orderly or coherently.”
“Hmm,” the Gray One said thoughtfully. “That is unfortunate, but I think I can limit the damage.” She asked Keisha many questions about the appearance of the men who had questioned her and the guards who had been present during the questioning, as well as the woman who had poked and prodded her.
“That will do, I think,” she said finally. “I can refine my finding spell, so it will find each of them the next time they enter a high-magic area. And then I can erase or, more likely, modify their memories of what you said when they questioned you, and the circumstances under which you left their prison. As magic grows stronger, perhaps I will eventually be able to do something permanent about this threat to my customers... but that will do for now, I hope.”
When Keisha was finished eating, the Gray One went to another room and came back with her mage’s staff, a seashell, and a bag of blue powder. “Are you ready to return to your own world?”
“Yes,” Keisha said. “I’ll miss having legs, but — they aren’t really mine. It would be wrong to keep them, and deprive the other Keisha of them.”
The Gray One spoke into the seashell: “Barsiq, is Keisha in Tariq’s body ready for the return?” She held the shell to her ear and listened, then nodded. “Let’s set up the circle,” she said, and led the way outside. She sprinkled the blue powder in a circle in the dirt road near the vans, and had Keisha stand inside. Then, making mystic gestures and speaking in a low voice, she lowered her staff to touch the edge of the circle.
There was a blue flash of light, and Tariq found himself in his own body once again. He was sitting in the middle of a blue chalk circle; Barsiq, ul-Kalsim, Tvalenn, and the Subtle One stood outside it, looking anxiously at him. They weren’t in the hollow of the hills they’d been in when Barsiq put the first spell on them, nor in the village, but somewhere higher up in the mountains; even from his low vantage point, Tariq could see for miles to the foothills below and the brightly colored rock formations of the desert beyond.
“Well,” he said, “I’m back.”
“It worked!” ul-Kalsim said. “So the Gray One rescued you, then?”
“Yes — I’ll tell you all about it. But where is ul-Balimmu?”
“He left, soon after we returned to our own bodies. Barsiq and the girls borrowing our bodies had brought them into the mountains; we’ve been making our way back to the foothills and the caravan road ever since we returned, until Barsiq suddenly told us a few hours ago that the Gray One had found you, and we needed to prepare to send Keisha back to her body.”
Tariq nodded. For more than a year after he lost his legs, it had felt strange not to have them, especially when he woke up in the morning. Now he felt that strangeness and loss again, but also something else: the strange absence of his breasts, the strange obtrusiveness of his male parts.
ul-Kalsim helped him onto the back of an ass — he hated the dependency, but an ass wouldn’t kneel on command like a camel, so he needed the help. The girls and Barsiq had apparently left their camels at the inn in the village, and hired asses before setting off into the mountains.
They continued down the mountain on the last leg of their journey back to where they had last seen their own bodies, and Tariq told the story of his imprisonment and interrogation. Ul-Kalsim said they had found no paper or ink here in the mountains, with which to write down what they remembered of the exhibits in the museum, but they had been talking over what they could remember, to remind one another and keep their memories alive until they could find writing materials, whether in a village of the foothills or in the city.
“We will build a printing press or a steam engine before I die, I swear it,” ul-Kalsim said, “though my grandsons may be old men by the time we can build internal combustion engines.” He used the English words for those things, there being none in their language.
“Oh,” Tariq said, “did you find a recipe for Coke? In the museum, or elsewhere?”
“No,” the Subtle One said with a sigh, “we were too busy helping the Gray One search for you.”
“Ah, well. There is always the pixie-wine.”
“Alas,” Tvalenn said, “the girls in our bodies seem to have drunk it all.”
Tariq hoped that Keisha in his body had enjoyed it enough to compensate her for the temporary loss of her legs. He thought it was a good trade.
That's all. Let me know if you see anything that can be improved; I'm going to do another revision for the short story collection ebook I'm working on, to improve the clarity re: the names of the characters, at least.
When Wasps Make Honey, the sequel to Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes, is now available from Smashwords in EPUB format and from Amazon in Kindle format. See here for more information.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. An earlier version of this story was serialized on the morpheuscabinet and tg_fiction mailing lists in January 2013.